Book Image

Serverless Analytics with Amazon Athena

By : Anthony Virtuoso, Mert Turkay Hocanin, Aaron Wishnick
Book Image

Serverless Analytics with Amazon Athena

By: Anthony Virtuoso, Mert Turkay Hocanin, Aaron Wishnick

Overview of this book

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using SQL, without needing to manage any infrastructure. This book begins with an overview of the serverless analytics experience offered by Athena and teaches you how to build and tune an S3 Data Lake using Athena, including how to structure your tables using open-source file formats like Parquet. You’ll learn how to build, secure, and connect to a data lake with Athena and Lake Formation. Next, you’ll cover key tasks such as ad hoc data analysis, working with ETL pipelines, monitoring and alerting KPI breaches using CloudWatch Metrics, running customizable connectors with AWS Lambda, and more. Moving on, you’ll work through easy integrations, troubleshooting and tuning common Athena issues, and the most common reasons for query failure. You will also review tips to help diagnose and correct failing queries in your pursuit of operational excellence. Finally, you’ll explore advanced concepts such as Athena Query Federation and Athena ML to generate powerful insights without needing to touch a single server. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to build and use a data lake with Amazon Athena to add data-driven features to your app and perform the kind of ad hoc data analysis that often precedes many of today’s ML modeling exercises.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Fundamentals Of Amazon Athena
5
Section 2: Building and Connecting to Your Data Lake
9
Section 3: Using Amazon Athena
14
Chapter 11: Operational Excellence – Monitoring, Optimization, and Troubleshooting
15
Section 4: Advanced Topics

Securing your application

In the previous section, we talked about some best practices when it comes to connecting to and calling Athena. In this section, we're going to touch a little bit more on that point, but with a focus on security, and then focus on some other mechanisms for using Athena in the safest way possible. In Chapter 5, Securing Your Data, we discussed the concepts of the attack surface and blast radius, two metrics by which you can measure how safe your application is, both in terms of preventing a bad actor from gaining access and then minimizing the impact in the event that they do gain access. Some of the stuff we are going to cover is not necessarily specific to an Athena-based application, but it is still very valuable information to keep in mind.

Credential management

Firstly, we're going to take a look at credentials, the entry point for secure communication with AWS. We're going to focus on two specific aspects of it – life cycle...