AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

Explanation

Amazon Athena is the correct service for directly querying and analyzing AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR). Here's why:

Amazon Athena Features:

• Serverless Interactive Query Service: Athena allows you to run SQL queries directly on data stored in Amazon S3
• AWS Cost and Usage Reports Integration: CUR files are stored in S3, and Athena can query them directly using standard SQL
• No Infrastructure Management: Being serverless, you don't need to provision or manage any servers
• Pay-per-query Pricing: You only pay for the queries you run

Why the Other Options Are Incorrect:

Amazon OpenSearch Service:

• Primarily used for log analytics, full-text search, and real-time application monitoring
• Not designed for direct querying of Cost and Usage Reports

Amazon Aurora:

• A managed relational database service compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL
• Requires data to be loaded into the database before querying
• Not designed for direct querying of S3-based CUR files

AWS Glue:

• A serverless data integration service for ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) jobs
• Used for preparing and transforming data for analytics
• Not designed for direct ad-hoc querying like Athena

How to Use Athena with CUR:

1. AWS Cost and Usage Reports are delivered to an S3 bucket
2. You can create tables in Athena that point to the CUR data in S3
3. Run SQL queries directly against the CUR data
4. Use the results for cost analysis, budgeting, and optimization

This makes Amazon Athena the most direct and efficient way to query AWS Cost and Usage Reports.