You might be familiar with the popular Amazon website, but have you ever heard of Amazon Redshift? While they had established themselves by selling products to consumers around the world, Amazon also got itself involved in the management and analysis of data online. Since November 2012, the creation of Amazon Redshift has assisted over 15,000 customers worldwide.
But many people don’t know about or understand the primary function of Amazon Redshift, nor why it is required. Getting online with the internet has connected millions of people and many different websites together, so managing and monitoring the data that is exchanged has become very important.
Are you curious to know even more about Amazon Redshift and what its true purpose is? Read onward to learn everything about Amazon Redshift and why it is in such high demand by many big companies.
What Is Amazon Redshift Exactly?
With large amounts of data being exchanged every day and the rise of cloud computing, organizations will need to store, manage, and analyze it all. As the organization grows larger, the demand for the analysis and storage of data increases as well. This is what Amazon Redshift looks to fulfill.
Amazon Redshift is a large scale cloud-based data warehouse product that stores and analyzes large amounts of data. The scale at which all of this is done can reach petabyte amounts of data, which is around 1000 terabytes of information.
The type of data that can be stored and managed can be anything ranging from customer information to sales data. That information can be analyzed and used to obtain a variety of new insights for a business or customer base.
How Redshift Works
How this all works is through the use of cluster structure of data. First, there is a leader node that manages computer nodes, which are comprised of individual slices, or databases. These are all subdivisions of data full of information.
Each cluster has its own Redshift engine with at least one database, allowing you to crunch large amounts of data within a shorter amount of time.
Better Than Traditional Data Warehouses
One of the perks of using Amazon Redshift over any other traditional data warehouse service is how fast and efficient it is.
You can have complex queries on massive amounts of data processed very fast, nearly in real-time. Amazon Redshift was designed with these types of large-scale calculations in mind, with large entities like the Dow Jones and Yelp using Redshift.
Even more important to the usefulness of Redshift is how it helps save time when processing information. Instead of relying on predictions or over-provisioning, Redshift has a concurrency scaling feature that allows clusters to be auto-scaled. Without that, it would take considerably longer to process higher workloads with a lot more data.
Safe and Secure Warehouse
Security is always a major concern with anything involving data, and Amazon Redshift is no exception. Redshift has many of the same security features of other large Amazon webs services. This includes security on the cloud with AWS services, cluster security groups, and private VPC environment.
While most companies that are concerned with the security of their data often worry, Amazon Redshift was built with keeping information safe and secure.
The Cost of Redshift
Amazon Redshift not only delivers with its fast speed and efficiency, but also with cost as well. Traditional data warehouses can be expensive from the start, to set up and maintain effectively. This could mean that some organizations can end up paying millions of dollars just to get situated.
While there is no clear upfront cost for setting up Redshift, the overall cost to organizations to set up and maintain would end up being far less. Redshift pricing can range according to the amount of data that is stored and the number of nodes it takes to do so. A single node can have up to 160GB of data within it.
To put it in better perspective, most organizations will need to answer one big question. Will you need to store more than a total 1 terabyte of storage or not?
Companies That Use Redshift
Some of the biggest companies in the world have used Redshift for their own respective industries. Because Amazon Redshift is applicable to just about any sector, some of the largest business entities in entertainment, education, banking and insurance have utilized the service.
Such companies that would fit this include USAA, the American Red Cross, MUFG, and even the Walt Disney Company. Because they receive a continuous large amount of information related to their business, they need a service like Redshift to analyze all of it.
Understanding Amazon Redshift
After having gone through all of this information about Amazon Redshift, hopefully you now have a better understanding of its purpose and importance to so many organizations. With so much of the world replying on data processing and exchange, the demand for Redshift is staggering. The ability to manage and query huge amounts of data with efficient speed and accuracy is Amazon Redshift’s biggest highlight.
Satori helps you keep your Amazon Redshift secure and compliant with data protection and privacy regulations. In addition, it streamlines access to sensitive data, reducing time-to-value from your Amazon Redshift data. To learn more, read about Satori for Redshift.
