Jen Underwood looks at the basics behind Amazon Athena:
Today early adopters of Amazon Athena are using it for big data analytics pipeline projects along with Kinesis streaming data and other Amazon data sources.
Athena is serverless parallel query pay-per-use service. There is no infrastructure to set up or manage. It scales automatically and can handle large datasets or complex distributed queries.
The easy way of thinking about Athena is that it’s ElasticMapReduce (a pay-as-you-go Hadoop cluster) without the ceremony of administering or spinning up the cluster.