Amazon Athena is now available in AWS China (Ningxia) Region

The new pay-as-you-go interactive query service can use standard SQL language to easily analyze data in Amazon S3, allowing AWS China customers to obtain query results within seconds

[ March 24, 2020, Beijing ] Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon company, today announced that Amazon Athena is now available in the AWS China (Ningxia) region operated by Western Cloud Data. Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that allows customers to easily analyze data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) using standard SQL language. Because Athena is a serverless service, customers do not need to manage infrastructure and only pay for the queries they run. Athena can automatically scale and execute queries in parallel, so even large data sets and complex queries can get query results quickly.

AWS provides analytical services such as Amazon Redshift and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) to enable companies of all sizes to analyze petabytes of data. With Amazon Redshift, customers can perform complex queries on large-scale structured data and get super-fast performance. For unstructured data, Amazon EMR uses popular distributed frameworks such as Apache Spark, Presto, Hive, and Pig across multiple dynamically scalable clusters to process and analyze large amounts of data quickly and economically. Although these services are scalable and powerful enough to handle large and complex big data applications, many customers also want to be able to quickly query data on Amazon S3, such as web logs, clickstreams, raw log files, etc., without having to start, configure, and manage a Hadoop cluster or data warehouse. Now, using Athena to analyze data in Amazon S3 is as easy as writing SQL queries. Athena uses Presto, which fully supports standard SQL, and can process a variety of standard data formats, including CSV, JSON, ORC, and Parquet. Because Athena uses compute resources in multiple availability zones to execute queries and uses Amazon S3 as the underlying data store, it is highly available and durable, with data stored redundantly across multiple infrastructures and on multiple devices on each infrastructure.

“Customers often ask us if they can easily run queries on data in the Amazon S3 data lake without having to worry about configuring and managing servers and clusters,” said Wenyi Zhang, AWS Global Vice President and Executive Director of Greater China. “Now, we are very happy to launch Amazon Athena in the AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by Western Cloud Data, in response to the needs of AWS China customers. Amazon Athena does not require infrastructure management at all, and anyone who can write SQL queries can quickly analyze their data in Amazon S3 in a cost-effective way.”

He Cheng, head of data operations at Cassandra, said, "As a global Internet technology company, Cassandra has 1.8 billion users worldwide. We have built a digital content connection portal to help users in more than 200 countries and regions around the world obtain high-quality digital content. Cassandra has a large amount of data, multiple analysis dimensions, and very complex business, so we often need multi-dimensional and multi-granular high-concurrency analysis. AWS's analysis tools meet our daily data extraction and analysis needs very well. With Amazon Athena, we can easily run interactive queries and analyze data without having to build and deploy additional clusters. At the same time, we have shortened the time required to run new data analysis by 30%, significantly reducing costs and operational risks."

Daewoo Infinity is a company specializing in mobile application development, mainly providing mobile short video services for emerging markets such as the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Latin America. "Every month, our business operations require a lot of manpower to analyze massive data from one billion users around the world." Li Rui, head of Daewoo Infinity platform technology, said, "After using Amazon Athena interactive query service, we can easily query and analyze user data directly in Amazon S3 using SQL language, saving costs and reducing operational pressure. Ordinary engineers and business department personnel can easily query various business data by themselves, greatly improving production efficiency."

In addition to SHAREit and Infinity, Amazon Athena is also trusted by many Chinese customers such as Mobvista and Kerwood Software for its speed, ease of use, cost-effectiveness, and flexibility.