AWS Big Data Blog

AWS Quick Sight: 2019 in review

2019 has been an exciting year for AWS Quick Sight. We onboarded thousands of customers, expanded our global presence to 10 AWS Regions, and launched over 60 features—more than a feature a week! We are inspired by you—our customers, and all that you do with AWS Quick Sight. We are thankful for the time you spend with us across in-person meetings, conference calls, emails, discussion forums, and AWS summits. As we close this year, here’s a quick summary of the highlights.

re:Invent 2019

The AWS Quick Sight team was at re:Invent alongside customers such as Best Western, Capital One, and Club OS, who spoke about their experiences implementing and using AWS Quick Sight for their analytics needs. We also ran two hands-on workshops using the newly launched APIs.

ANT324: Deploy business analytics at enterprise scale with AWS Quick Sight

This session discussed how enterprises are rolling out AWS Quick Sight Enterprise Edition for all their users and using features such as Active Directory or Federated SSO (SAML/OpenID Connect) authentication, private connectivity to data in AWS, email reports, and embedded dashboards.

Best Western rolled out AWS Quick Sight for business reporting across tens of thousands of users, using it in conjunction with Amazon Redshift and AWS Glue. While their previous legacy reporting system took 18 months and over 7,000 staff hours to upgrade server software versions, they now benefit from AWS Quick Sight’s modern reporting infrastructure and constant feature updates, and do not need to manage any servers to report on this data.

Capital One has made AWS Quick Sight available internally to their BI community of over 25,000 users. Key benefits that the Capital One team sees from Quick Sight include the ability to roll out new BI use cases without server setup or capacity planning, integrated machine learning (ML) capabilities, and the absence of a traditional software update cycle. All this is with PrivateLink connectivity to data in AWS (Snowflake, Presto, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon RDS), and pay-per-session pricing for consumption with a max charge of $5 per month, per reader.

ANT217: Embedding analytics into applications with AWS Quick Sight

This session dove into the latest features that allow you to integrate AWS Quick Sight dashboards into your software development lifecycle, including new APIs, theming capabilities, and dashboard embedding. The full session recording is available on YouTube.

As an Independent Software Vendor (ISV), Club OS uses AWS Quick Sight’s embedded capabilities to add analytics to their cloud-based Customer Relationship Management for fitness and wellness businesses. AWS Quick Sight’s serverless architecture lets Club OS focus on meeting actual customer needs without being burdened by operations and infrastructure management. This architecture also provides fast, consistent performance for end-users; the analytics dashboards are rolled out to over 40,000 users across 3,500 health and fitness locations. For more information, see the section of the talk on YouTube by Nicholas Hahn, VP of Product Club OS.

As an enterprise with tens of thousands of internal users, Capital One uses AWS Quick Sight’s embedded capabilities to add analytics to internal applications and portals. With no servers to set up, teams can set up embedded dashboards in their portals in as quickly as a week, whether they want to serve this to just a few users or thousands. Traditional BI approaches to such portals would require server setup and maintenance, and expensive licensing contracts. For more information, see the section of the talk on YouTube by Latha Govada, Senior Manager Analytics at Capital One.

ANT302 – Enhancing your applications with AWS Quick Sight dashboards

This hands-on workshop session guided users through setting up an AWS Quick Sight Enterprise Edition account, connecting to data, creating dashboards, and using APIs to add users, move assets across development and staging versions, and embedding dashboards in a web portal. For more information, see Dashboard Embedding & Operationalizing with Quick Sight APIs. Try it out for yourself!

Embedding, theming, and APIs

We followed up on our launch of dashboard embedding for federated AWS identities at re:Invent 2018 (for more information about how the NFL uses embedded AWS Quick Sight dashboards for hundreds of stakeholders of Next Gen Stats, see the session video on YouTube). In 2019, we launched the following features:

Machine learning integrations

We added the following native ML integrations in AWS Quick Sight to help you make the most of your data in AWS and Quick Sight:

Visualizations and interactivity

We added the following support for new chart types, conditional formatting, Quick Sight Actions, sheets in dashboards, and more:

Calculations and aggregations

We added the following new aggregation options, new functions, and more:

Data connectivity and security

We increased SPICE limits, provided finer control over data sources in Quick Sight, enabled data source sharing, and more:

  • SPICE datasets now accommodate up to 100 million rows of data in Enterprise Edition and 25 million rows for Standard Edition. For more information, see Data Source Limits.
  • Fine-grained access control over S3 and Athena allows you to scope down access to these data sources to specific users or groups in AWS Quick Sight using IAM.
  • Cross data source joins allow business analysts to perform joins across supported data sources without relying on data engineering teams to set up complex ETL processes.
  • Shared data sources centralize credential management of data sources. This also allows shared ownership of data connections, allowing collaboration over SQL scripts that define custom SQL datasets.
  • Connecting to Presto data sources in AWS without any public routing of data similar to Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, RDS, and others.
  • AWS Quick Sight data sources connect to Amazon Athena, which you can tag against specific workgroups. This allows cost allocation of Athena queries by workgroup.

Mobile

We launched the new Quick Sight Mobile app for iOS and Android, which allows you to access your dashboards and explore your data with drill-downs and filters. For more information, see New QuickSignt Mobile App on YouTube.

Geographic availability

We added the following new Regions and language support in AWS Quick Sight:

  • AWS Quick Sight is now available in 10 AWS regions: US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt, Ireland, and London), and Asia Pacific (Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo).
  • The AWS Quick Sight interface is now available in 10 languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.

With all of our updates you can build dashboards like the ones below and integrate them into your applications and portals.

Insurance Analytics dashboard by Ironside Group

Insurance Analytics dashboard by Ironside Group

Looking ahead

To see the full list of 2019 launches, see What’s New in AWS Quick Sight or subscribe to the AWS Quick Sight YouTube channel for the latest training and feature walkthroughs. We have a packed roadmap for 2020, and continue to focus on enabling you with insights from all your data, sharing these with all your users, while not having to worry about operations and servers. Thank you for your support.

We wish you all the very best in the new year (and decade)!

About the authors

Jose Kunnackal John is a principal product manager for AWS Quick Sight.

 

 

 

 

Sahitya Pandiri is a senior technical program manager with Amazon Web Services. Sahitya has been in product/program management for 6 years now, and has built multiple products in the retail, healthcare, and analytics space.