Amazon Redshift: What, Why, and How

Some technologies have an aura of complexity. Not because of the complexity of use or configuration. Rather, because of the amount of complexity it hides beneath. The sales talk itself is so overwhelming, very few have the courage to go beyond that. However, if you do take that step forward, you are surprised by the simplicity.

Amazon Redshift is one such service. It just comes with too many acronyms and tech jargon. There is a lot that we can do with Redshift. It provides a clean interface to a rather complex architecture. It hides a lot of complexity underneath. But that does not complicate Redshift! This blog will help you understand the core concepts clearly enough to use Redshift in your architecture.

But before we start, let us have a look at some important concepts

What is Redshift?

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. Now, what exactly is this data warehouse? Let us understand that before we jump in.

A data warehouse is the one central repository of ALL the data available within an enterprise. This may seem conflicting. We talk about DB per MS pattern in microservices. How then can we have one central repository of data? Well, that is the difference between analytics and transactions. Transactional data is split…