What’s new in Amazon Redshift – Serverless?

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Amazon Redshift has added a slew of new features in recent months, including a game-changing one – SERVERLESS 🚀

AWS introduced the preview of Amazon Redshift Serverless last year at re:Invent 2021, a serverless option of Amazon Redshift that allows you to analyze data at any scale without having to manage data warehouse infrastructure.

You simply load and query your data, and you only pay for what you use. This enables more businesses to develop a modern data strategy, particularly for use cases where analytics workloads are not running 24 hours a day and the data warehouse is not always active. It is also applicable to organizations where data use expands within the organization and users in new departments want to run analytics without having to own data warehouse infrastructure.

Amazon Redshift Serverless is now generally available, with many new capabilities added. Amazon Redshift Serverless compute costs are also lower than in the preview.

To know how to easily analyze data and run different queries using Amazon Redshift Serverless without having to manage the infrastructure, refer:

How to easily analyze data and run different queries using Amazon Redshift Serverless without having to manage the infrastructure?

In this blog we will cover:

  • What is Amazon Redshift?
    • Features
    • Use cases
    • Companies using Amazon Redshift
  • What’s new in Amazon Redshift – Serverless
    • How does it work?
    • Benefits
    • Use cases
    • Pricing
    • Companies using Amazon Redshift – Serverless
  • Conclusion

What is Amazon Redshift?

Data warehousing software from AWS is called Amazon Redshift. Redshift excels at processing massive amounts of data; it can process both organized and unstructured data in the exabyte range (1018 bytes). The service can be utilized for substantial data migrations as well, though.

It offers a variety of options for importing data and can be installed with only a few clicks, like many other AWS services. Redshift’s data is also always encrypted for further security.

Redshift aids in extracting important insights from voluminous data. You can build a new cluster in a few minutes with the simple-to-use AWS interface, and you don’t have to worry about managing infrastructure.

What is unique about Redshift?

Redshift is a column-oriented OLAP-style (Online Analytical Processing) database. It is built on top of PostgreSQL 8.0.2. This implies that Redshift can be utilized with standard SQL queries. However, this isn’t what makes it unique from other services. Redshift stands out for its quick responses to queries on massive databases containing exabytes of data.

The MPP, or massively parallel processing design, enables quick querying. ParAccel developed the technology. With MPP, many computer processors operate simultaneously to perform the necessary computations. Processes can occasionally be delivered by processors dispersed over several servers.

Features of Amazon Redshift

Use cases of Amazon Redshift

  • Increase developer productivity: Without configuring drivers or managing database connections, you can get simplified data access, ingest, and egress from a variety of programming languages and platforms.
  • Collaborate and share data: Share data securely between accounts, organizations, and partners while developing applications on top of third-party data.
Amazon Redshift - Serverless
  • Improve financial and demand forecasts: Create, train, and deploy machine learning models automatically for predictive insights.
  • Optimize your business intelligence: Using Amazon QuickSight, Tableau, Microsoft PowerBI, or other business intelligence tools, create insight-driven reports and dashboards.

Companies using Amazon Redshift 

Amazon Redshift - Serverless

What’s new in Amazon Redshift – Serverless 

Now broadly available, Amazon Redshift Serverless enables you to run and scale analytics without needing to set up and maintain data warehouse clusters. All users, including data analysts, developers, and data scientists, may now utilize Amazon Redshift to quickly gain insights from data. To provide excellent performance for all of your analytics, Amazon Redshift Serverless automatically creates and smartly scales data warehouse capacity.

You just pay on a per-second basis for the computing that is consumed during the workloads. You can take advantage of this simplicity without altering your current business intelligence and analytics tools.

The following AWS Regions are where Amazon Redshift Serverless is typically offered: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), and Europe (Stockholm).

How does it work?

Amazon Redshift - Serverless

Benefits of Amazon Redshift – Serverless

  • Get insights from data in seconds: By getting started quickly and performing real-time or predictive analytics on all of your data, you can concentrate on gaining insights. 
  • Experience consistently high performance: Even for the most demanding and unpredictable workloads, Amazon Redshift Serverless intelligently scales data warehouse capacity up or down to offer consistently quick performance.
  • Save costs and stay on a budget: You just pay for the seconds that you really utilize. You are not charged when the data warehouse is not in use. With granular spending restrictions, you may set your spending cap and never go over your budget.
  • Get started with no modifications: Profit from robust analytics with a user-friendly interface, without affecting your use of existing apps or cutting-edge features like machine learning. Simply load the data and launch your preferred BI tool to get started.

Use cases of Amazon Redshift – Serverless 

  • Ad-hoc self-serve analytics: Get quick, useful insights from your data by running what-if analysis, performing anomaly detection, and using ML-based forecasting.
  • Variable and sporadic workloads: As workload demands change or traffic increases, scale resources easily and maintain consistent performance for thousands of concurrent users.
  • Development and test environments: To get your products to market faster, quickly, easily, and affordably spin up a development and testing environment.

Pricing in Amazon Redshift – Serverless

When you use the Amazon Redshift Serverless option, you only pay for the compute capacity that your data warehouse uses when it is active.

Amazon Redshift - Serverless

To save administration time and money, your data warehouse capacity automatically scales up or down to meet the demands of your analytics workload and shuts down during periods of inactivity. Redshift Processing Units are used by Amazon Redshift to measure data warehouse capacity (RPUs).

You pay for workloads in RPU-hours per second (with a minimum charge of 60 seconds), including queries that access data in open file formats in Amazon S3. There are no fees for data warehouse setup time.

Automatic scaling and extensive security features are included. Concurrency scaling and Redshift Spectrum are both included with Amazon Redshift Serverless and do not require additional payment.

If you have never used Amazon Redshift Serverless before, you are eligible for a $300 credit with a 90-day expiration date when you try Amazon Redshift Serverless. The rate at which this credit is consumed is determined by actual usage and the compute capacity of your Serverless endpoint.

Companies using Amazon Redshift – Serverless

Conclusion

In this blog, we explained what is Amazon Redshift, what is unique about Redshift, its features, use cases, what’s new in Amazon Redshift – Serverless, how does it work, and its benefits, use cases, pricing & companies using Amazon Redshift & Serverless. For Part 2, we will demonstrate how to easily analyze data and run different queries using Amazon Redshift Serverless without having to manage the infrastructure. We will come up with more such topics in our upcoming blogs.

Meanwhile …

If you are an aspiring AWS Enthusiast and want to explore more about the above topics, here are a few of our blogs for your reference:

How To Create Redshift Clusters And Query Data?

How to design a Redshift cluster and query data using a query editor?

Stay tuned to get all the updates about our upcoming blogs on the cloud and the latest technologies.

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