Amazon Redshift is AWS's fully managed, petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse, designed for large-scale analytical workloads and business intelligence. As one of the original cloud data warehouses, it is widely deployed across enterprises already invested in the AWS ecosystem — offering deep integration with S3, Glue, SageMaker, and the broader AWS data services stack.
Product Overview
Redshift's architecture uses massively parallel processing (MPP) to distribute query execution across multiple nodes — enabling fast aggregation and analytical queries across billions of rows. Redshift Serverless removes the need to manage cluster sizing, automatically scaling compute resources based on workload demand and billing only for query execution time. Redshift Spectrum extends queries directly to data in S3 without loading it into the warehouse — enabling ad hoc analysis of raw data lake files alongside structured warehouse tables. For AWS-native organisations, Redshift integrates seamlessly with AWS Glue (ETL), QuickSight (BI), SageMaker (ML), and Lake Formation (governance) — creating a complete data platform without leaving the AWS console.
Key Features
- Massively Parallel Processing: Distribute queries across multiple nodes for fast analytical workloads — aggregations, joins, and scans across billions of rows.
- Redshift Serverless: Automatically scale compute up and down based on workload demand — pay per query without managing cluster capacity.
- Redshift Spectrum: Query data directly in S3 using standard SQL — analyse raw data lake files alongside warehouse tables without loading.
- AWS Ecosystem Integration: Native integration with S3, Glue, SageMaker, QuickSight, Lake Formation, and every major AWS data service.
- Materialised Views & ML: Materialised views for pre-computed aggregations, plus Redshift ML for training and running SageMaker models with SQL.
Best For
Enterprises already on AWS that need a managed, scalable data warehouse tightly integrated with the AWS data services ecosystem — particularly those using S3, Glue, and SageMaker.
Pricing
Serverless: $0.36/RPU-hour. Provisioned nodes: from $0.25/hour (dc2.large). Reserved instances: significant discounts. Free trial available.
Key Integrations
AWS S3, AWS Glue, AWS SageMaker, Amazon QuickSight, Fivetran, dbt, Tableau, Power BI, Salesforce, Looker
Pros
- Deep AWS ecosystem integration — no additional connectors needed for AWS-native stacks
- Redshift Serverless removes cluster management overhead
- Spectrum enables querying S3 data lake without separate infrastructure
- Strong price/performance for consistent, high-volume analytical workloads
Cons
- Less competitive than Snowflake for cross-cloud or multi-cloud architectures
- Cluster management (provisioned mode) adds operational overhead vs. competitors
- Vendor lock-in to AWS ecosystem — less portable than open-format competitors
