Amazon Redshift is a direct alternative to traditional locally stored data warehouses. In practice, it's interesting to see how it stacks up against traditional storage in the following areas: performance, cost, scalability, and security.
Check out all the details below!
Amazon Redshift performance
Amazon Redshift is best known for its speed. It offers fast queries on large datasets, handling information block sizes up to a petabyte and much more.
The speed at which Redshift processes data up to these sizes is simply impossible to achieve in traditional data warehousing, making it the best choice for applications that run large amounts of on-demand queries.
The ability to deliver this level of performance comes with the use of two architectural elements: columnar data storage and massively parallel processing design.
The cost of Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is markedly faster than traditional storage, but when it comes to choosing technology solutions, organizations are more concerned about cost.
As a cloud-based solution, Amazon Redshift is able to affordably deliver world-class performance. IT executives know that traditional storage is extremely expensive from the start, with the initial hardware outlay possibly running into the several million.
On the other hand, there are no substantial upfront costs to set up and get started with Redshift. As a fully managed solution, Redshift has no recurring hardware and maintenance costs.
Database administrators can set up data warehouses that can handle massive amounts of data without having to go through the long lead strategic acquisition and purchase process that multi-million dollar on-premises hardware requires.
Amazon Redshift Scalability
Traditional data warehousing presents a major challenge whether your data needs increase or decrease.
For traditional storage, when organizations' data needs to change, they are forced to make another round of expensive investments to acquire and implement new hardware.
Amazon Redshift allows for more flexibility and elastic scale. As your requirements change, Redshift can instantly scale up or down to meet your capacity and performance needs with just a few clicks in the management console.
On-demand pricing in terms of cost ensures that you only pay for what you use. Not being tied to expensive hardware and lengthy maintenance contracts means organizations have the freedom to change their minds without having to consume sunk costs.
Amazon Redshift Security
While Amazon Redshift is demonstrably better than traditional storage in the ways mentioned above, security remains the tipping point for many companies, but it's not because of known security vulnerabilities.
The reality is that some still feel worried about not having their data physically present.
That said, security is a primary concern for Amazon Web Services (AWS), knowing that this is an important point when making decisions for storage solutions.
Amazon Redshift Security Best Practices
Amazon follows the security model of shared responsibility, where Amazon is responsible for security from the cloud and the organization is responsible for security in the cloud.
- Cloud Security: AWS protects the infrastructure where AWS services run in the cloud. They are responsible for ensuring that features and services that can be used safely are available to users.
AWS also ensures that security levels are regularly tested and verified as part of AWS compliance.
- Security na a cloud: The security responsibility of organizations using Redshift is determined by the AWS service they use.
Organizations are also responsible for other factors such as data confidentiality, an organization's own internal requirements, and compliance with laws and regulations.
That said, Amazon Redshift has most of the security features of the larger Amazon Web Services platform. Credentials and access are granted and managed at the AWS level through Identity and Access Management (IAM) accounts.
Cluster security groups are created and associated with data clusters for inbound access. For organizations using a private cloud, access through a virtual private cloud (VPC) environment is also available.
Data encryption is also enabled at cluster creation and cannot be switched from encrypted to unencrypted directly.
For data in transit, Redshift uses SSL encryption to communicate with S3 or Amazon DynamoDB for COPY, UNLOAD, backup and restore operations.
→ Also read: Implementing Amazon Redshift on Autoglass!
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