AWS Re:Invent: AWS floats cloud-based data warehousing plans

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is planning to launch a new cloud-based data warehousing service early next year, which it claims will be a tenth of the cost of its rivals' on-premise offerings.

The cloud giant's new Redshift service was unveiled during the opening keynote of the AWS Re:Invent customer and partner conference in Las Vegas, and is available now on a limited preview basis.

The company claims the product will allow end users to analyse data sets of any size using existing SQL-based business intelligence tools through the AWS management console.

End users have a choice of two node types, which can house 2TB or 16TB of data, respectively.

On-demand pricing for the 2TB data warehouse will start at $0.85 per hour, and end users that opt for reserved instance pricing will benefit from a $0.228 per hour pricing rate. AWS claims this works out at less than a tenth of the price of comparable offerings on the market today.

During the keynote, Andy Jassy, senior vice president of AWS, said the product was priced to appeal to large and small firms, and has already been extensively tested by the team at Amazon.com.

"Anybody who has used traditional, old guard data warehousing solutions knows they're really expensive and complicated to manage," said Jassy.

Anybody who has used traditional, old guard data warehousing solutions knows they're really expensive and complicated.

"Customers are unhappy with these solutions. They've been telling us for years."

He claimed end users often feel like they are forced to pay too much for traditional on-premise data warehousing products.

"Smaller companies know that it's never been less expensive or easier to store and collect data than today because of the cloud, [but] they're left out in the cold [with data warehousing]," he explained.

"As a result, they throw out a lot of their data [because they can't afford to analyse it]."

The reported performance gains Amazon.com achieved have been put down by AWS to the use of columnar data storage, advance compression and high performance IO in Redshift.

"Instead of spending many millions of dollars [on date warehousing], [Amazon.com] will spend $32,000 a year [with Redshift]," added Jassy. "It's pretty game changing."