Compliance has asked a one-off question about a year of web server logs that are already sitting in Amazon S3 as compressed files. The answer is needed this week, the question is unlikely to be asked again, and nobody wants to stand up a cluster or load the data anywhere first. Which service answers it?
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02), objective 3. Cloud technology and services medium
Machine-checked — no person has signed for it. This question was read against the source cited below by an automated pass, which found no contradiction. That is a weaker claim than it sounds: the same kind of process wrote the question, so it can confirm its own mistake.
Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.
The options
Correct Amazon Athena
Correct. Athena runs SQL directly against files in S3 with no infrastructure to create, and it is billed by the amount of data each query scans — which is the right economics for a question asked once.
Not correct Amazon Redshift
Wrong for a one-off. Redshift is a data warehouse: excellent when the same analytical questions are asked every day over data you have loaded, but here you would build a cluster and load a year of logs into it to answer a single query.
Not correct Amazon EMR
Wrong. EMR runs managed big-data frameworks such as Spark and Hadoop. It is far more capable than this needs and comes with cluster sizing and job authoring that a single SQL question does not justify.
Not correct Amazon QuickSight
Wrong layer. QuickSight is the business intelligence and dashboard tool. It visualises results from a source such as Athena or Redshift; it is not itself the engine that reads raw files in a bucket.
Why
The analytics services divide by job. Athena asks S3 a question in SQL, serverless and per query. AWS Glue is the catalog and the ETL that tells Athena what those files contain. Redshift is the warehouse where data you query repeatedly lives. EMR is for the big-data frameworks when SQL is not enough. QuickSight is the dashboard on top. A useful shorthand: Athena is for the question you ask once, Redshift is for the questions you ask every morning.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- AWS exam guide task statement 3.7
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 3 and space the ones you get wrong.
Practise AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02)
More questions on this objective
- A team builds the same stack — a load balancer, three EC2 instances and a database — by clicking through the console once for dev, once for test and once for production. The three environments have quietly drifted apart and a bug that only appears in production took a week to trace to a missing setting. They want the stack described once, reviewed in a pull request, and applied identically to each environment. Which service does that? machine-checked
- A Python reporting job runs unattended every night. Inside its own logic it needs to list objects in an S3 bucket, read a few of them, and write a summary object back, handling failures with the program's existing retry and logging code. What is the appropriate way for that program to call AWS? machine-checked
- A small team has a Java web application and no operations staff. They want to hand AWS the application package and have it provision the instances, the load balancer and the scaling policy, while keeping the ability to inspect and adjust those resources later if they need to. Which service fits? machine-checked
- A manufacturer keeps its plant-floor control application on servers inside the factory, because production must continue when the internet link drops. Its reporting and analytics run in AWS and read the same production data. Which TWO statements about this arrangement are accurate? machine-checked
- An internal application runs on a single EC2 instance in one Availability Zone. During a power event in that Availability Zone the application was unreachable for four hours. The team wants the cheapest change that keeps it serving through the same kind of event, without moving to another Region. What should they do? machine-checked
- A German insurer is told by its regulator that customer records must remain within the European Union. Four candidate Regions can all run every service the workload needs, and one of them is noticeably cheaper per instance-hour. Which consideration settles the choice of Region first? machine-checked