What is one of the main uses of Amazon Athena?

Amazon Athena is primarily designed for querying data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL, and it operates on an on-demand basis without requiring the user to manage any underlying server infrastructure. This makes it particularly attractive for users looking to analyze data quickly without the operational overhead associated with traditional databases or data warehousing solutions. With Athena, users can easily run queries on data in various formats, such as CSV, JSON, Parquet, or ORC, enabling straightforward data analysis and reporting tasks.

The other options relate to functionalities that are not the main focus of Athena. Continuous data streaming typically involves services like Amazon Kinesis. Data ingestion from IoT devices is better served by AWS services specifically designed for handling time-series data, such as AWS IoT Core or AWS IoT Analytics. Creating machine learning models is facilitated by services like Amazon SageMaker, which provides tools for building, training, and deploying machine learning models, rather than a query engine like Athena that focuses on data analysis.