Athena is Uber's platform for stream processing built on Apache Samza. It uses Kafka as the messaging system and allows for near real-time computation of data streams. Some current uses at Uber include pricing calculations, event processing, and driver status updates. Athena provides tooling like a job manager, configuration files, testing frameworks, and integration with services like Graphite. Ongoing work includes improving upgrades, adding more metrics, and enhancing configuration validation.