What is Amazon Athena?

Amazon Athena is a serverless, interactive analytics service built on open-source frameworks, supporting open-table and file formats. Athena provides a simplified, flexible way to analyze petabytes of data where it lives. Analyze data or build applications from an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) data lake and 30 data sources, including on-premises data sources or other cloud systems using SQL or Python. Athena is built on open-source Trino and Presto engines and Apache Spark frameworks, with no provisioning or configuration effort required.

Athena is ranked #24 of 200 most trafficked AWS service.

My role

I am responsible for leading and designing the end-to-end user experiences for Amazon Athena. I collaborate with my cross-functional team from concepts to implementation to build customer-focused solutions at scale. My focus is primarily the web console (UI or web interface).

Due to my NDA, I am unable to share my design artifacts publicly. If interested, feel free to reach out as I’m happy to discuss my process at a general level.

List of launched features

12/5/2023 - AWS Analytics simplify users’ data access across services with IAM Identity Center: AWS Analytics services, including Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR, AWS Lake Formation, Amazon Athena, and Amazon S3 via S3 Access Grants, now use trusted identity propagation with AWS IAM Identity Center to manage and audit access to data and resources based on user identity. Analytics users benefit from an improved single sign-on experience when accessing data.

11/20/2023 - Provisioned capacity integrates with Amazon CloudWatch metrics: Integration with Amazon CloudWatch (monitoring service) metrics for capacity reservations that provide insight on the compute resources your queries use.

11/17/2023 - Cost-based optimizer: enhance query performance without requiring changes in your SQL code by analyzing query plans.

04/28/2023 - Provisioned capacity: allows customers to run SQL queries on fully-managed compute capacity for a fixed price and no long-term commitments.
How it works blog →

03/28/2023 - Minimum encryption: ensure all query results are encrypted at or above a level of encryption that the customer specifies.

11/08/2022 - Query result reuse: a caching feature that accelerate repeat queries.

04/21/2022 - New data source connectors: expands the number of data sources you can query with Athena and helps analysts, data engineers, data scientists, and developers unlock business value from data stored in databases running on-premises or in the cloud.