In November, Amazon Web Services announced Redshift, a “fast and powerful, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse in the cloud.” At the time, it was only available to a limited few customers as a preview service. Now it’s finally becoming available to all customers.
Amazon announced today that any AWS customer can now launch a Redshift cluster from within the AWS management console. Customers can start with a few hundred terabytes, and then scale up to a petabyte or more. Redshift costs under $1,000 per terabyte per year.
“When we set out to build Amazon Redshift, we wanted to leverage the massive scale of AWS to deliver ten times the performance at 1/10 the cost of on-premise data warehouses in use today,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President of Database Services, Amazon Web Services. “With order of magnitude improvements in price/performance, Amazon Redshift makes big data analytics accessible to more people, allowing large organizations to analyze more of their data and smaller ones to afford fast, scalable data warehousing technology. We are delighted by the excitement from our preview customers as they’ve experienced the performance improvement and lower costs that Amazon Redshift delivers.”
During its time in preview, Redshift proved to be popular among various small businesses and large organizations that leveraged the power of Amazon’s servers. Many of the reviews praise the speed and ease of use in using Redshift, while others say it has saved them countless dollars by moving massive datastores off of their own servers and onto Amazon’s.
Those interested in Amazon Redshift, or AWS in general, can hit up the Web site. Just know that Redshift is currently only available on Amazon’s U.S. East servers in Virginia. It will be rolling out to other AWS locations in the coming months.