Querying S3 Logs with Athena

Amazon Athena is a serverless, interactive query service that runs standard SQL directly against data stored in Amazon S3. There is no database to provision or manage: you point Athena at data in S3, define a schema, and query. This makes it ideal for analyzing the huge log files AWS produces.

Athena is serverless and you pay per query based on the amount of data scanned. There is no idle cost when you are not querying. This pricing model rewards efficient queries and well-organized data, since scanning less data is both faster and cheaper, a theme that recurs throughout Athena usage.