AWS Athena - Cost Management

AWS Athena has a pay-as-you-go pricing model which offers great flexibility to the user. In this chapter, we will briefly explain how Athena charges you and the strategies that you can follow to minimize costs in AWS Athena.

Understanding Athena Pricing and Query Costs

AWS Athena charges based on the amount of data scanned by your queries. The more data it scans, the higher the cost. You have to pay per terabyte (TB) of data scanned. Currently, the cost is around $5 per TB of data scanned but this can vary by region.

For example, suppose you query a dataset of 500 GB, and Athena need to scan the entire dataset, the cost would be $2.50.

How Athena Pricing Works?

Athena pricing depends largely on the following three factors −

Data Scanned

Every time you run a query, Athena needs to scan the relevant data from Amazon S3. The total cost will be based on how much data is scanned during the query.

Uncompressed Data

Uncompressed data takes more space. It means when you run a query on unstructured data, Athena will need to scan more data. It increases the cost.

Results Stored in S3

When you run a query the results of your query will be saved to S3. You need to pay standard S3 storage cost.

Strategies for Minimizing AWS Athena Costs

Here are some of the strategies that you can implement to minimize costs in AWS Athena −

• Use Compression to Reduce Data Size
• Partition Your Data
• Select Only the Required Columns
• Optimize Your File Sizes
• Limit Query Results with Caching
• Monitor Query Usage and Costs

Understanding how Athena costs are calculated and applying strategies to minimize these costs is necessary for efficient cost management.