CLF-C02 Cloud Technology and Services Practice Question
A company processes millions of customer records and needs to query data in Amazon S3 without loading it into a database. The data is stored in Parquet format. Which AWS service enables this with no infrastructure to manage?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse Amazon Redshift Spectrum (which also queries S3) with a serverless service, but it still requires a managed Redshift cluster, whereas Athena is truly serverless with zero infrastructure management.
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 allows you to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL, with no infrastructure to manage. It natively supports Parquet format, which is columnar and optimized for efficient querying, making it ideal for querying millions of customer records without loading them into a database.
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 Spectrum
Why it's wrong here
Amazon Redshift Spectrum lets you run SQL queries over data in S3 through external tables, but it requires a provisioned Amazon Redshift cluster to act as the SQL engine. Because the cluster is an always-on data warehouse, you must manage nodes, concurrency, and capacity and pay for the cluster even when only querying S3. Athena is fully serverless, scaling automatically and requiring no persistent compute to return query results.
- ✓
Amazon Athena
Why this is correct
Amazon Athena is a serverless, interactive query service that runs standard SQL directly against objects in S3, with no infrastructure to provision or manage. It uses Presto under the hood and charges per query based on the amount of data scanned. Storing data in Parquet is ideal because its columnar layout lets Athena read only the columns needed, sharply reducing scan volume and cost.
- ✗
Amazon EMR
Why it's wrong here
Amazon EMR can run Spark, Hive, and Presto jobs that read data from S3, but it is not a serverless query service. You must provision an EMR cluster of EC2 instances, manage scaling and lifecycle, and pay for cluster compute hours even when no queries are running. For simply running ad-hoc SQL directly on S3 objects, Athena eliminates all of that operational overhead.
- ✗
AWS Glue ETL
Why it's wrong here
AWS Glue ETL is a serverless data integration service that executes extract-transform-load jobs using PySpark or Scala; it is not designed for interactive SQL queries. You write or generate ETL scripts, schedule them, and have them write transformed data back to S3 or another target. While Glue's Data Catalog supplies table metadata and can work with Athena, Athena is the actual query engine that executes SELECT statements against S3.
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 |
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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.