If you're using AWS athena for querying, you're also using the aws glue catalog (managed hive metastore-ish service) to know where partitions are, but yeah, you'll need to partition and sort your data to make sure you're not doing full table scans.
Glue worked well for my previous gig, but honestly it felt like a bit of an overkill. If you have a large org and a lot of tribal knowledge + new fields showing up out of the blue, yes you need to organize and keep track.
If you are a relatively small operation, I’d recommend weighing additional complexity over the benefits. Sometimes a few we’ll written pages can suffice, other times you need to make the investment.
