City council staff need occasional interactive SQL against open-data files already landing in Amazon S3, but the IT board refuses to stand up and pay for a always-on data warehouse cluster. Which service best enables that ad-hoc querying pattern?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Council questions are like pop quizzes—you don’t keep a whole classroom powered on for one pop quiz a week. Athena lets staff run SQL on S3 when they need it and shut the meter off when they don’t. Always-on RDS, DIY Hadoop, or Direct Connect-to-Excel miss the serverless lake idea.
Full Explanation
Amazon Athena provides serverless, interactive SQL over data in Amazon S3 without provisioning a persistent warehouse cluster, which aligns with infrequent municipal ad-hoc questions. Continuously running RDS or self-managed Hadoop clusters incur ongoing operational and capacity cost regardless of query volume. Direct Connect plus desktop macros is not a scalable lake query architecture. Athena is the purpose-built choice for on-demand SQL against an S3 data lake.