Amazon Redshift Becomes Available Worldwide

Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com-owned company that provides reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platforms in the cloud to power thousands of companies in over 190 companies, announced on Friday that Amazon Redshift is now openly available for use.

“When we set out to build Amazon Redshift, we wanted to leverage the massive scale of AWS to deliver 10 times the performance at 1/10 the cost of on-premises data warehouses in use today,” Raju Gulabani, vice president of Database Services for Amazon Web Services, said to the Herald Online. “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.”

While traditional data warehouses take up a large amount of time and money to maintain and control, Amazon Redshift will allow customers to increase performance with the same tools they use in everyday business, for almost half the effort and cost.

"Digital marketers have seen an explosion in the amount and variety of customer data," said StrongMail CTO, Jeremy Sterns. “These technologies open up new possibilities that are unavailable to those offered by legacy email service providers with siloed databases."

Amazon Web Services launched in 2006, and began exposing key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of cloud computing. With Amazon Redshift, customers can launch a cluster starting at a few hundred gigabytes, or a cluster bigger than a petabyte, for under $1000 per terabyte per year. This lowers the cost of a data warehouse, and makes it easier for a business to evaluate its vast amounts of data in a reasonable amount of time.

AWS also cut 15 to 32 percent off its price for relational database deployment. The change in price occurred in its Multiple Availability Zone (Multi-AZ), so prices will drop only in areas where Multi-AZ deployment takes place.