CLF-C02 Cloud Technology and Services Practice Question
A company is building a data lake on AWS. Which AWS service provides a serverless interactive query service that allows analysts to query data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse AWS Glue (an ETL service) with Athena (a query service), or assume Amazon Redshift is serverless because of its recent serverless option, but the question explicitly requires a serverless interactive query service for S3 data using standard SQL, which only Athena fulfills.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Amazon Athena
Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that enables analysts to query data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. It requires no infrastructure management, as Athena automatically scales and executes queries directly against data in S3, making it the ideal choice for ad-hoc analysis on a data lake.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Amazon Redshift
Why it's wrong here
Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse that requires you to provision and operate a cluster of compute nodes, choose node types, and load data into columnar tables (typically via COPY or ETL jobs) before you can run queries. Redshift Spectrum can query data in S3, but it still requires an active Redshift cluster, so it does not provide the zero-infrastructure, pay-per-query model of Athena. Since the scenario calls for serverless SQL directly against S3, Redshift is the wrong choice.
- ✓
Amazon Athena
Why this is correct
Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that runs standard SQL directly against data stored in Amazon S3, using a Presto/Trino engine under the hood, so there are no servers or clusters to manage. You are billed per query based on the amount of data scanned, and results are available in seconds to minutes, which makes it ideal for ad-hoc analysis of S3 objects. In this scenario, Athena directly matches the requirement for serverless S3 querying with no infrastructure management.
- ✗
Amazon EMR
Why it's wrong here
Amazon EMR is a managed big data platform for running frameworks such as Apache Spark, Hive, and HBase, but it operates by launching an EMR cluster of EC2 instances that you must size, configure, monitor, and eventually terminate. The effort and cost of cluster provisioning make it unnecessarily heavy for a simple SQL query, and you would still need additional query tools or notebooks to run SQL statements. Because Athena removes all cluster management and query boilerplate, EMR is not the right fit for this use case.
- ✗
AWS Glue
Why it's wrong here
AWS Glue is a serverless ETL service primarily used to extract, transform, and load data between sources, while also maintaining the Glue Data Catalog of table metadata. It is not a SQL query engine for interactive S3 analytics, and running queries on it would require building and triggering ETL jobs rather than submitting ad-hoc SQL directly. The Glue Data Catalog often complements Athena by providing table definitions, but Glue itself does not perform the query execution.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
Go deeper
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CLF-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CLF-C02 exam.