AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner — Question 305

A company has been storing monthly reports in an Amazon S3 bucket. The company exports the report data into comma-separated values (.csv) files. A developer wants to write a simple query that can read all of these files and generate a summary report.

Which AWS service or feature should the developer use to meet these requirements with the LEAST amount of operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Amazon S3 Select
• B. Amazon Athena
• C. Amazon Redshift
• D. Amazon EC2

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that enables direct SQL querying of data stored in Amazon S3, making it the option with the lowest operational overhead. Amazon S3 Select is designed to retrieve subsets of data from single objects rather than querying across multiple files. Amazon Redshift and Amazon EC2 both require provisioning and managing infrastructure, which introduces significant operational overhead.