Redshift Turns 10: The Evolution of Amazon’s Cloud Data Warehouse

Amazon Redshift, a fully managed petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse service, debuted a decade ago and has since evolved to meet the needs of dynamic data analytics world. It was introduced as an alternative to on-premise data warehouses that cost millions to run. Over the years, it has added features such as Redshift Spectrum for querying data in Amazon S3, Concurrency Scaling for managing query spikes, and RA3 nodes with managed storage for separating compute from storage. In 2021, new features like Data Sharing, AQUA, Redshift ML, and the SUPER data type were introduced to handle more diverse data types and be more interconnected within AWS. The latest addition is Redshift Serverless, which eliminates the need for cluster or node provisioning or management. Automated Materialized Views are another key feature that was added in 2022. Looking ahead, we can expect increased automation in managing workloads, materialized views, and optimizing tables and schemas.