Amazon Redshift and the Case for Simpler Data Warehouses

Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse solution that makes it simple and cost-effective to efficiently analyze large volumes of data using existing business intelligence tools. Since launching in February 2013, it has been Amazon Web Service's (AWS) fastest growing service, with many thousands of customers and many petabytes of data under management. Amazon Redshift's pace of adoption has been a surprise to many participants in the data warehousing community. While Amazon Redshift was priced disruptively at launch, available for as little as 1000/TB/year, there are many open-source data warehousing technologies and many commercial data warehousing engines that provide free editions for development or under some usage limit. While Amazon Redshift provides a modern MPP, columnar, scale-out architecture, so too do many other data warehousing engines. And, while Amazon Redshift is available in the AWS cloud, one can build data warehouses using EC2 instances and the database engine of one's choice with either local or network-attached storage.