Amazon Web Services Wednesday announced the availability of its new Amazon Athena tool.

The new service enables serverless queries of massive amounts of data stored in Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, without needing to set up data warehouses or spin up Hadoop clusters first.

AWS said the idea behind Amazon Athena is that it can simplify the process of querying petabyte-scale data stored in standard formats such as CSV, log files, JSON, Apache ORC and Apache Parquet.

The company said customers can point Athena at data stored in S3 with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, and start using standard SQL to run queries against it. Results are delivered in seconds, and there’s no need to manage or tune any clusters, or setup any infrastructure beforehand, the company added. In addition, customers only need to pay for queries they run.

“Athena includes an interactive query editor to help get you going as quickly as possible,” AWS evangelist Jeff Barr said in a blog post. AWS provides more details in an FAQ page on Athena, explaining which use cases it’s best suited for, as opposed to other services such as the Amazon Redshift data warehouse or more specialized data processing frameworks such as Amazon EMR.

Amazon Athena has already racked up a number of endorsements from users who have had an early look at the service. Real-time traffic intelligence provider Inrix Inc. explained that it ingests terabytes of road network and movement data on a daily basis, as its data scientists need to analyze the data to build mathematical models for predictive analytics on road networks. Athena helps Inrix to dig into that data quickly and easily, the company said.

“We jumped at the opportunity to try Amazon Athena and loved the speed, ease of use, and flexibility offered by Amazon Athena,” said Harsh Shah, a group engineering manager at Inrix. “With Amazon Athena, any of our developers can query all of our data stored on Amazon S3 using SQL, without worrying about infrastructure or knowledge of big data processing systems. Amazon Athena has enabled us to quickly turn Amazon S3 into our data lake.”

Al Hilwa, program director for software development research at International Data Corp., explained that Athena is basically an implementation of the Presto parallel query engine, adapted for use on the AWS cloud.

“I think it is a highly useful technology for querying large data-sets that are too big to move around or that you want to explore before further optimization,” Hilwa said. “Given how much data people have in S3, and given the pay by the glass approach and the convenience, this will prove a popular service.”

Amazon Athena is currently available in the US East and US West regions, but Barr said the service will be rolled out to other regions in the “coming months.”

He added that users only have to pay for the queries they run, with costs based on the amount of data scanned by each query. “This means that you can realize significant cost savings by compressing, partitioning, or converting your data to a columnar format,” he added.

Main image credit: Amazon Web Services