AWS Big Data Blog

Amazon Redshift at AWS re:Invent 2021 recap

The annual AWS re:Invent learning conference is an exciting time full of new product and program launches. At the first re:Invent conference in 2012, AWS announced Amazon Redshift. Since then, tens of thousands of customers have started using Amazon Redshift as their preferred cloud data warehouse. At re:Invent 2021, AWS announced several new Amazon Redshift features that bring easy analytics for everyone while continuing to increase performance and help you break through data silos to analyze all the data in your data warehouse. With re:Invent packed with information and new announcements, it’s easy to miss the best of the updates in Amazon Redshift. In this post, we summarize these announcements, along with resources for you to get more details.

AWS takes analytics serverless

Adam Selipsky took the re:Invent keynote stage on November 29, 2021, for the first time as AWS CEO, announcing a string of innovations along the theme of pathfinders. He shared the story about Florence Nightingale, a pathfinder and data geek who had a passion for statistics, who collected and analyzed data on sanitation impact on mortality rates to mobilize the army at the time to approve new hygiene standards and restructure health efforts. The theme set the stage for the AWS modern data strategy, which enables everyone in the organization to find patterns in data and mobilize their business with data with the right tools for the right job. Selipsky’s announcement of serverless options for four AWS Analytics services, including Amazon Redshift, emphasized the growing need to be able to run complex analytics without touching infrastructure or managing capacity for your applications. Watch Adam Selipsky’s keynote announcement of AWS Analytics services with new serverless options (00:52).

Amazon Redshift: Under the hood

This year, VP of AWS Machine Learning Services Swami Sivasubramanian expanded his keynote to include the entire data and machine learning (ML) journey for all workloads and data types. In addition to mentioning the new serverless option announcement for Amazon Redshift in preview, he dove under the hood of Amazon Redshift to explore core innovations since its inception in 2012 that drove the service to become a best-in-class, petabyte-scale data warehouse for tens of thousands of customers. Sivasubramanian touched on features that enable Amazon Redshift to power large workloads with top-notch performance, including RA3 instances, AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator), materialized views, short query acceleration, and automatic workload management. He also elaborated on how Amazon Redshift ML uses SQL to make ML predictions from your data warehouse. Neeraja Rentachintala then took you through a demo set in a gaming environment to outline the value of Amazon Redshift Serverless and Amazon QuickSight Q.

Reinvent your business for the future with AWS Analytics

Rahul Pathak, VP of AWS Analytics Services, talked in detail about how you can put your data to work and transform your businesses through end-to-end AWS Analytics services that help you modernize, unify, and innovate. He talked about how customers like Zynga, Schneider Electric, Magellan Rx, Jobcase, and Nasdaq are benefitting from Amazon Redshift with innovations in performance as data volumes grow. He elaborated on how Amazon Redshift helps you analyze all your data with AWS service integration, and touched upon the quest to make analytics easy for everyone with the introduction of the new Query Editor v2, Amazon Redshift Serverless, and data sharing capabilities. Watch the session to gain a deeper understanding of AWS Analytics services.

What’s new with Amazon Redshift, featuring Schneider Electric

This session is a must-watch for every existing and new Amazon Redshift customer to get a full understanding of the breadth and depth of features that Amazon Redshift offers along the dimensions of easy analytics for everyone, analyze all your data, and performance at scale. Eugene Kawamoto, Director of Amazon Redshift Product, goes into detail about all the new launches in 2021, tracing the architectural evolution of Amazon Redshift to the new serverless option. He explores how Amazon Redshift integrates with other popular AWS services to help you break through data silos, analyze all your data, and derive value from this data.

Democratizing data for self-service analytics and ML

Access to all your data for fast analytics at scale is foundational for 360-degree projects involving data engineers, database developers, data analysts, data scientists, business intelligence professionals, and the line of business. In this session, Greg Khairallah and Shruti Worlikar, leaders in the AWS Analytics GTM organization, team up with our customer Jobcase, represented by Senior Scientist Clay Martin, to show how easy-to-use ML can help your organization imagine new products or services, transform your customer experiences, streamline your business operations, and improve your decision-making. A secure, integrated platform that’s easy to use and supports nonproprietary data formats can improve collaboration through data sharing and also improve customer responsiveness.

Introducing Amazon Redshift Serverless

Following the announcements in the keynotes, this session takes you through the new serverless option on Amazon Redshift, which enables you to get started in seconds and run data warehousing and analytics workloads at scale without worrying about data warehouse management. In this session, learn from Yan Leshinsky, VP of Amazon Redshift, and Neeraja Rentachintala, Principal Product Manager for Amazon Redshift, on how Amazon Redshift Serverless automatically provisions data warehouse capacity and intelligently scales the underlying resources to deliver consistently high performance and simplified operations for even the most demanding and volatile workloads.

Introduction to AWS Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift

We’ve talked about Amazon Redshift Serverless several times, but there were some exciting announcements from the service leading into re:Invent. We launched AWS Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift, which allows you to combine third-party data found on AWS Data Exchange with your own data from your Amazon Redshift cloud data warehouse, requiring no ETL and accelerating time to value. This provides a powerful enhancement to the strong data-sharing capabilities in Amazon Redshift to share secure, live data across Regions, accounts, and organizations. In this session, product managers Neeraja Rentachintala and Ryan Waldorf walk through the value of this integration and how to access and analyze a provider’s data with data providers, which enables licensing this access to their Amazon Redshift cloud data warehouses. Alex Bohl, Director of Data Innovation from Mathematica, joins them in this session to provide a real-world example.

Additional sessions

In addition to these sessions, the hands-on-workshops and chalk talks were packed with customers looking to learn more about Amazon Redshift’s capabilities in ML with Redshift ML, concurrency scaling, and much more. These sessions were not recorded.

Get started with Amazon Redshift

Learn more about the latest and greatest of what Amazon Redshift offers you, and explore the following resources for more information about new releases:

About the Author

Sunaina Abdul Salah leads product marketing for Amazon Redshift.