Athena

Platform Overview

What Athena is and how teams use it in production.

Athena is a unified gateway and control plane for data-intensive systems.

Primary Responsibilities

  • Data Access: gateway CRUD routes, SQL, RPC, and REST-compatible endpoints.
  • Data Automation: pipelines and deferred execution for asynchronous workflows.
  • Data Operations: backups, restore jobs, provisioning, client lifecycle, and health.
  • Data Governance: API keys, rights, per-client controls, and audit logging.

Typical Deployment

  1. Configure logical clients in config.yaml and optional catalog tables.
  2. Route requests by X-Athena-Client, or use direct x-pg-uri for eligible PostgreSQL gateway/SQL-driver paths.
  3. Execute runtime operations through /gateway/*, /query/*, /pipelines, and /management/*.
  4. Operate production workflows through /admin/*, /metrics, and health endpoints.

Key Differentiators

  • One contract across multiple backends.
  • Strong operational APIs beyond raw data querying.
  • SDK and MCP-friendly interfaces for app and agent usage.

Core contract model

Athena’s top-level design works best when client identity, lifecycle, capabilities, and dispatch are defined by Athena first, and only then delegated to backend drivers.

Read Athena Contracts for the canonical contract model behind client resolution, route capability checks, backend dispatch, and the current Postgres-to-multi-backend decoupling work.

Athena Server Platform

Runtime model, contracts, routing, architecture, and backend boundaries for Athena server.

Athena Contracts

The canonical contract model for Athena client identity, capabilities, connection, routing, and backend dispatch.

On this page

Primary ResponsibilitiesTypical DeploymentKey DifferentiatorsCore contract model