AWS Announces General Availability of Concurrency Scaling for Amazon Redshift

With More Than 200 New Features and Enhancements in the Last Two Years, Amazon Redshift Delivering an Average of 10x Faster Query Times and over 10,000 Customers (The Clear Cloud Leader for Data Warehouses)

Amazon Web Services Inc., an Amazon.com company, announced the general availability of Concurrency Scaling, a new Amazon Redshift feature that automatically adds and removes capacity to handle unpredictable demand from thousands of concurrent users. Concurrency Scaling comes at no cost to almost all customers, and every customer – even those with the spikiest workloads – will immediately see greater processing capacity at lower costs with more predictable spend. AWS also shared that Amazon Redshift has more than 10,000 customers, making it the most popular cloud data warehouse. The experience gained from serving a large and diverse customer base, along with the lessons learned from processing over two exabytes of customer data every day, has enabled Amazon Redshift to accelerate feature development and continuously optimize performance, delivering 10x faster average query times to customers over the last two years.

“Amazon Redshift is a critical part of Yelp’s analytics infrastructure because of its performance and scalability”

Concurrency Scaling is the latest innovation of more than 200 features and enhancements delivered to customers during the past two years, including Elastic Resize, which adds more nodes to a cluster in minutes, and Short Query Acceleration, which uses machine learning algorithms to speed up interactive queries. To learn more about Amazon Redshift’s recently released capabilities.

“Amazon Redshift provides ten times the performance of traditional on premises data warehouses at one tenth the cost, and it has the most customers and the largest production deployments of any cloud data warehouse provider,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President, Database, Analytics, and Machine Learning at AWS. “Customers choose Amazon Redshift for its performance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. We’ve had thousands of customers for several years, and as the service has grown, we’ve been lucky enough to get continuous feedback on what we can do to improve the service. This feedback has led to the more than 200 features and capabilities added to the service during the past two years, including Elastic Resize, Short Query Acceleration, and now Concurrency Scaling. Concurrency Scaling adds to Amazon Redshift’s scalability and flexibility by transparently adding and removing capacity to handle unpredictable workloads from thousands of concurrent users. The features and enhancements released over the past two years mean that customers are seeing a 10x improvement in query times on average, and with Concurrency Scaling, the service transparently scales to handle unpredictable demand, making it ideal for all customer data warehousing workloads.”

In addition to the performance gains, customers choose Amazon Redshift because it provides the flexibility to extend their data warehouse to analyze exabytes of data across their Amazon S3 data lake without unnecessary data movement or duplication. Customers can store their data in their Amazon S3 data lake in popular open formats such as Parquet, ORC, and JSON. They can then use Amazon Redshift Spectrum to break down data silos to answer the most complex analytical questions and uncover new business insights across their data warehouses and data lake.

Pfizer, McDonald’s, Hilton Hotels Worldwide, Yelp, Intuit, Redfin, NTT DOCOMO, Equinox Fitness, and Edmunds are just a few of the more than ten thousand customers and partners that benefit from Amazon Redshift’s new features and enhancements.

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Pfizer is one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, with revenue of $53.6 billion in 2018. “Amazon Redshift enables us to provide scientists with near real-time analysis of millions of rows of manufacturing data generated by continuous manufacturing equipment, with 1,600 data points per row,” said Jim Silva, Director Business Partner, Pfizer Inc. “Redshift enables us to query our high-volume data at 10 times the performance of our prior data warehousing solution. Because of the performance and scale Redshift provides, we have increased our manufacturing efficiency by optimizing future manufacturing runs. In addition, we have reduced the time needed to gather and prepare data for regulatory submissions by a factor of five and now avoid repeated experimentation, which would otherwise have taken an extra three weeks of scientists’ time.”

McDonald’s is one of the world’s leading global foodservice retailers with over 37,000 locations in 120 countries. McDonald’s uses Amazon Redshift to run global workloads for operational reporting and dashboards. “Amazon Redshift enables faster business insights and growth, and provides an easy-to-manage infrastructure to support our data workloads. Redshift has given us the confidence to run more data and analytics workloads on AWS and helps us meet the growing needs of our customers,” said Abhi Bhatt, Director Global Data & Analytics, McDonald’s.

Hilton Hotels Worldwide operates 5,400 hotels across six continents. To help drive data insights for key business applications, including worldwide hotel booking and reservation management systems, the company replaced multiple legacy data warehousing environments with a data lake running on Hadoop and AWS. Data from billions of records and objects from various reservation and business applications are fed into the data lake, where it is analyzed in real time using Hadoop and Amazon Redshift. “Using Amazon Redshift to identify common characteristics, patterns, and trends in hotel reservations, our revenue management team has already reduced analysis time by 50 percent over the previous legacy data warehouse system,” said Sudhir Menon, VP of Enterprise Information Management, Hilton Hotels Worldwide.

Amazon.com, one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies, with over $230B in annual revenues, recently migrated all their analytical workloads from Oracle to a data lake architecture on AWS. “Amazon Redshift has been a key component of our successful migration off Oracle and has enabled us to significantly reduce the cost of our analytics while scaling to support one of the largest analytical workloads in the world,” said Dave George, VP of Technology Software & Development, Amazon.com. “We currently have over 500PB of data in our Redshift clusters and our Amazon S3 data lakes that we analyze to deliver mission critical insights to support all parts of the company. Working in partnership with AWS, we continue to leverage new features such as Redshift Spectrum. Integration with Redshift Spectrum has significantly reduced the cost of analyzing our largest datasets while providing consistently fast performance.”

NTT DOCOMO is the largest mobile service provider in Japan, serving more than 68 million customers. “We migrated to Amazon Redshift in 2014 because it was 10 times faster than our prior on-premises system. Today, it is the center of our analytics environment,” said Masayuki Tsuda, General Manager of Service Innovation Department, NTT DOCOMO. “Since we first started using Amazon Redshift, we have added thousands of analysts and data scientists to analyze tens of petabytes daily. Redshift provides our users with consistently faster performance, even as its usage within the company has grown.”

FOX Corporation produces and distributes content through some of the world’s leading and most valued brands, including: FOX News, FOX Sports, the FOX Network, and the FOX Television Stations. FOX empowers a diverse range of creators to imagine and develop culturally significant content, while building an organization that thrives on creative ideas, operational expertise and strategic thinking. “Redshift allows us to ingest, optimize, transform, and aggregate hundreds of millions of events per day at scale, coming to us from a variety of sources,” said Alex Tverdohleb, Vice President Data Services, Consumer Products & Engineering, FOX Corporation. “With recent improvements in Redshift’s performance, we are noticing a 3.5x to 4x improvement in the performance of our workload over the last year alone, and at half the cost compared to other vendors. We’re especially excited about Concurrency Scaling because it allows us to scale up at a moment’s notice to handle unpredictable workloads with almost no additional charges. The speed and quality of the data delivery allows our internal and external customers to drive the business and operations forward faster and more cost effectively.”

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Intuit is a leading provider of financial management software for consumers, small businesses, and accounting professionals. “We moved our mission-critical workloads to Amazon Redshift from our on-premises environment to speed development, innovate faster, and better solve customers’ needs,” said Jason Rhoades, System Architect at Intuit. “Redshift’s performance allows us to scale our workloads by over 3x in 2019 at no additional cost. With new features such as Auto-Vacuum and Auto-Analyze, we’ve been able to eliminate all of our database maintenance jobs, enabling our team to focus on our customers. More teams at Intuit are looking to use Redshift for an ever-wider array of business opportunities because of its exceptional performance, cost, and elasticity.”

Yelp is a local-search service that aims to connect people with great local businesses and has over 148 million local business reviews. Yelp stores approximately 18 months’ worth of advertising information in Amazon Redshift. Teams use the information to understand how ads are being delivered and to train models that will result in more relevant future ads. “Amazon Redshift is a critical part of Yelp’s analytics infrastructure because of its performance and scalability,” said Shahid Chohan, Software Engineer at Yelp. “We love how the Amazon Redshift team continuously adds features that make Redshift faster, more elastic, and easier to use. The latest new feature, Concurrency Scaling, instantly adds capacity to support additional users and removes it when the load subsides, with nothing to manage on our end. We’ve deployed this on all our Redshift clusters because it gives us the flexibility to handle the variance in our workloads over the course of a day without us having to intervene.”

All Nippon Airways (ANA) is Japan’s largest airline, operating domestic and international routes. “We use Amazon Redshift to analyze ANA’s international and domestic flight reservations, ticket issuing and boarding information, aircraft operation records, and cargo transportation records,” said Hajime Fudeshima, director of Business Intelligence, Innovation, and IT Strategy at ANA. “Multiple divisions of ANA are able to analyze all of our data in Amazon S3 with Amazon Redshift Spectrum, enabling us to immediately generate unique insights that differentiate our business.”

Equinox Fitness is an American luxury fitness company with more than 145 locations within every major city across the United States in addition to London, Toronto, and Vancouver. Equinox Fitness migrated to Amazon Redshift to analyze their clickstream data. “Moving to Amazon Redshift has helped us reduce our overall maintenance costs by nearly 80% when compared to our legacy data warehouse,” said Elliott Cordo, VP of Data Analytics, Equinox Fitness. “By leveraging Redshift Spectrum’s ability to query data directly in our Amazon S3 data lake, we have been able to easily integrate new data sources in hours, not days or weeks. This has not only reduced our time to insight, but helped us control our infrastructure costs. Redshift requires very little maintenance, to the point where we don’t even have a dedicated administrator and spend less than an hour a month on maintenance and administration.”

Redfin is a technology-powered real estate brokerage, combining its own full-service agents with modern technology to redefine real estate. Redfin can innovate quickly and cost effectively while managing billions of property records. “Amazon Redshift provides the core analytics infrastructure that we rely on. Using the Elastic Resize feature that was released last year, we can optimize our performance by easily scaling up our cluster when faced with increased demands and scaling down during off-peak hours,” said Yong Huang, Director of Big Data and Analytics, Redfin. “Amazon Redshift’s ability to query data across our Redshift cluster and our Amazon S3 data lake, gives us a single view of all our data and makes it easy for our analysts to gain the insights they need seamlessly and quickly.”

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Edmunds is an online resource for automotive information, which offers detailed and constantly updated information about vehicles to 20 million monthly visitors. “At Edmunds, Amazon Redshift provides a scalable and cost-effective infrastructure to support all of our analytical workloads,” said Greg Rokita, Executive Director of Technology, Edmunds. “Amazon Redshift delivers faster performance the more we use it because it uses machine learning to optimize our workloads and accelerates our queries. Twenty percent of our queries now complete in less than a second. We were also impressed with Redshift’s new Elastic Resize feature, which adds capacity to our clusters in minutes, with no effort needed on our end. As Redshift continuously improves on performance and scalability, our mission-critical workloads automatically run even faster.”

Tableau’s leading analytics platform helps customers derive insights from their data stored within Amazon Redshift. “Amazon Redshift is one of our customers’ most commonly selected data sources, so we know firsthand the power it provides, enabling customers to create a massively scalable data warehouse with just a few clicks. We are proud to collaborate with the Amazon Redshift team to ensure an optimal customer experience when leveraging Tableau to gain insights that help them drive their business,” said Brian Matsubara, Senior Director of Global Technology Alliances at Tableau Software. “We’re excited to see the rapid innovation and continuous improvements in performance and scale by the Redshift team and look forward to working together to help more customers realize the power of data.”

Informatica provides innovative capabilities to accelerate customer adoption of cloud analytics with AI-driven automation of data management including data migration, data ingestion, data integration, and data quality. “Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is loading more than one trillion transactions per month to Amazon Redshift and we are seeing tremendous joint customer momentum and growth,” said Ronen Schwartz, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cloud, Big Data, and Data Integration at Informatica. “We are excited to leverage the dramatic performance improvement and query throughput increases the Redshift team has delivered as they enable our customers to execute analytics at scale, minimize time to insight, and help our customers accelerate their data-driven digital transformations. The improvements over the last two years have enabled us to grow with confidence knowing that Redshift’s performance will scale as we grow.”

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Delivery Hero is a Berlin-based food delivery service that operates in over 40 countries, delivering more than one million orders a day. “We aggregate over 10 terabytes daily from a diverse set of data sources and APIs from around the world into our Amazon Redshift data warehouse running on AWS,” said Kevin Viraud, Principal Data Engineer (International) at Delivery Hero. “Our daily processing workload has increased by 50 percent over the past 12 months but the performance improvements released by the Redshift team over the same time period have meant that we are actually processing data faster than before and haven’t had to increase the size of our cluster. This has allowed us to stay well within our projected budget while improving our data delivery SLAs.”

Periscope Data helps data professionals across some of the world’s most recognizable brands get full control over the analytics lifecycle — including ingestion, storage, analysis, visualization, and reporting — and gives line-of-business owners and non-technical users the ability to use data to quickly answer questions. “We’re here to create a more data-driven world, where everyone can understand and unlock the full potential of their data,” said Tom O’Neill, Co-Founder and CTO of Periscope Data. “We operate hundreds of Redshift clusters running tens of millions of queries per day, and our workloads can fluctuate significantly throughout the day. With Concurrency Scaling, Amazon Redshift makes it easy for us to efficiently add query capacity and enables us to deliver a consistently great experience to all of our customers, at any concurrent query load.”