Amazon Redshift Features & Benefits

Fast

Optimized for Data Warehousing – Amazon Redshift uses a variety of innovations to obtain very high query performance on datasets ranging in size from hundreds of gigabytes to a petabyte or more. It uses columnar storage, data compression, and zone maps to reduce the amount of IO needed to perform queries. Amazon Redshift has a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture, parallelizing and distributing SQL operations to take advantage of all available resources. The underlying hardware is designed for high performance data processing, using local attached storage to maximize throughput between the Intel Xeon E5 processor and drives, and a 10GigE mesh network to maximize throughput between nodes.

Scalable – With a few clicks of the AWS Management Console or a simple API call, you can easily scale the number of nodes in your data warehouse up or down as your performance or capacity needs change. Amazon Redshift enables you to start with as little as a single 2TB XL node and scale up all the way to a hundred 16TB 8XL nodes for 1.6PB of compressed user data. Amazon Redshift will place your existing cluster into read-only mode, provision a new cluster of your chosen size, and then copy data from your old cluster to your new one in parallel. You can continue running queries against your old cluster while the new one is being provisioned. Once your data has been copied to your new cluster, Amazon Redshift will automatically redirect queries to your new cluster and remove the old cluster.

Inexpensive

No Up-Front Costs – You pay only for the resources you provision. You can choose On-Demand pricing with no up-front costs or long-term commitments, or obtain significantly discounted rates with Reserved Instance pricing. On-Demand pricing starts at just $0.85 per hour for a single node 2TB data warehouse, scaling linearly with cluster size. With Reserved Instance pricing, you can lower your effective price to $0.228 per hour for a single 2TB node, or under $1,000 per TB per year. To see more details, visit the Amazon Redshift Pricing page.

Easy to Use

Get Started in Minutes – With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console or simple API calls, you can create a cluster, specifying its size, underlying node type, and security profile. Amazon Redshift will provision your nodes, configure the connections between them, and secure the cluster. Your data warehouse should be up and running in minutes.

Fully Managed – Amazon Redshift handles all the work needed to manage, monitor, and scale your data warehouse, from monitoring cluster health and taking backups to applying patches and upgrades. You can easily add or remove nodes from your cluster as your performance and capacity needs change. By handling all these time-consuming, labor-intensive tasks, Amazon Redshift frees you up to focus on your data and business.

Fault Tolerant – Amazon Redshift has multiple features that enhance the reliability of your data warehouse cluster. All data written to a node in your cluster is automatically replicated to other nodes within the cluster and all data is continuously backed up to Amazon S3. Amazon Redshift continuously monitors the health of the cluster and automatically re-replicates data from failed drives and replaces nodes as necessary.

Automated Backups – Amazon Redshift’s automated snapshot feature continuously backs up new data on the cluster to Amazon S3. Snapshots, are automated, incremental, and continous. Amazon Redshift stores your snapshots for a user-defined period, which can be from one to thirty-five days. You can also take your own snapshots at any time, which leverage all existing system snapshots and are retained until you explicitly delete them. Once you delete a cluster, your system snapshots are removed but your user snapshots are available until you explicitly delete them.

Easy Restores - You can use any system or user snapshot to restore your cluster using the AWS Management Console or the Amazon Redshift APIs. Your cluster is available as soon as the system metadata has been restored and you can start running queries while user data is spooled down in the background.

Secure

Encryption – With just a couple of parameter settings, you can set up Amazon Redshift to use SSL to secure data in transit and hardware-acccelerated AES-256 encryption for data at rest. If you choose to enable encryption of data at rest, all data written to disk will be encrypted as well as any backups.

Isolation - Amazon Redshift enables you to configure firewall rules to control network access to your data warehouse cluster. You can also run Amazon Redshift inside Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to isolate your data warehouse cluster in your own virtual network and connect it to your existing IT infrastructure using industry-standard encrypted IPsec VPN.

Compatible

SQL - Amazon Redshift is a SQL data warehouse and uses industry standard ODBC and JDBC connections and Postgres drivers. Many popular software vendors are certifying Amazon Redshift with their offerings to enable you to continue to use the tools you do today. See the Amazon Redshift partner page for details.

Designed for use with other AWS Services – Amazon Redshift is integrated with other AWS services and has built in commands to load data in parallel to each node from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon DynamoDB. AWS Data Pipeline enables easy, programmatic integration between Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).