Amazon Redshift
A columnar cloud data warehouse. You load data once into managed storage and query it many times, and two ways of running it decide how you pay.
Data lands once in managed storage. Everything else queries it.
Same SQL, two billing models.
RA3 clusters
Nodes you size and pay per hour, from about $0.543 an hour. Fits steady load; reserved instances lower the price.
RPUs
Capacity in RPUs, billed per second while queries run, 60 seconds minimum. From 4 RPUs, about $1.50 an hour.
Managed storage
Billed per GB-month, separately from compute, so storage grows without adding nodes.
Prices for US East (N. Virginia), check the current price for your region.
Most of the bill and the speed comes from here.
How much base capacity
Serverless starts from the base capacity you set, and the default is 128 RPUs. Small and medium workloads often run fine much lower.
How rows are spread
Keys on the columns you join and filter on keep work on each node. Check them before adding capacity.
Where the data sits
Hot tables in managed storage, history read in place from S3, other teams reading through data sharing instead of a copy.
* On provisioned clusters, 10 MB minimum per query. On Serverless, Spectrum queries are billed as RPU time.
A Redshift bill, in one line.
Build & optimize your data platform on AWS
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Read the approach →The one-page Amazon Redshift field guide.
Best practices, cost traps and performance checks, in the order you should run them. Printable, no fluff.