Amazon Redshift and EC2 High Storage Instances Available in Singapore

Amazon Web Services, Inc., an Amazon.com company, announced that its Redshift and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) high storage instances are now available in the AWS Singapore Region.

Redshift is a fast and powerful, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can launch a Redshift cluster, starting with a few hundred gigabytes and scaling to a petabite or more, for under $1,000 per terabyte/ year.

Traditional data warehouses require significant time and resource to administer. In addition, the financial cost associated with building, maintaining, and growing self-managed, on-premise data warehouses is high. Redshift lowers the cost of a data warehouse, and also makes it easy to analyze large amounts of data quickly. With Redshift, customers can increase query performance when analyzing virtually any size data set, using the same SQL-based business intelligence tools they use. Redshift uses a number of techniques, including columnar data storage, compression, and performance IO and network, to achieve higher performance than traditional databases for data warehousing and analytics workloads. It is managed, automating common tasks associated with provisioning, configuring, monitoring, backing up, scaling, and securing a data warehouse.

EC2 High Storage Instances provide high storage density per instance and are for applications that require performance sequential read and write capabilities over large data sets, such as data warehousing and Hadoop clusters. With High Storage instances, customers can run demanding data-driven applications without any up-front capital investments while benefiting from the low cost and elasticity of EC2.

Customer Success
Since its launch in November 2012, Redshift has become the fastest growing new service in AWS history. Many Redshift customers are lowering their costs, improving performance, and free of the hassle and complexity of managing and operating an on-premises data warehouse.

Wego.com is a travel search site in the AsiaPac and Middle East with more than 50 localized country sites in 30 languages. Headquartered in Singapore, Wego uses AWS to develop application services to search hundreds of global travel websites and display the best airfares, hotel rates and travel deals at any destination. As Wego’s business grew, they found that their in-house MySQL-based analytics solution became slow and inefficient for complex queries.

“We initially tested Amazon Redshift as a data warehousing solution because there was no upfront cost. Also, it was so easy to transfer large amounts of our Amazon EC2 hosted data and take Amazon Redshift through its paces,” said Ross Veitch, Wego CEO and co-founder. “Amazon Redshift has proven to be a good solution for Wego as it saved us the hassle of managing our own Hadoop cluster in-house and greatly expanded our ability to tie together massive data sets to perform useful analysis. Since using Amazon Redshift, we have seen a significant increase in information retrieval and data mining performance.”

BookMyShow is India’s leading ticketing service for movies, sports, theatre and events. The company’s traditional on-premises data warehouse was extremely slow in providing actionable data for decision making, and was becoming more costly and less effective as their business scaled. BookMyShow started using Redshift in April 2013 as a backend for Tableau, a business analytics software solution that was running in their on-premises infrastructure.

“With Amazon Redshift, we are able to efficiently analyze all our transactional data using Tableau and integrate the analytics and reporting platform seamlessly on AWS. This has enabled us to achieve a 60 percent reduction in the time it takes to analyze data,” said Parikshit Dar, director, BookMyShow. “In our business, speed is critical and Amazon Redshift has given us the competitive edge to better serve our customers. Moreover, it has reduced our storage and processing costs significantly, helping us to realize another 60-70 percent savings.”

Zalora, a growing online fashion retailer in Asia, carries more than 100,000 products by 400 leading brands. Zalora’s competitive advantage is achieved through operational excellence and data-driven decision-making to drive business growth. The company’s current traditional data warehouse solution is slow and unreliable. Moreover, flat data replicas of their key databases in MySQL do not scale well or offer time series data. To improve operation and cost efficiency, Zalora turned to Redshift in June 2013.

“Initially we used Amazon Redshift as a data mart for the data science team. Now, it is increasingly used for production data mart tasks such as providing our marketing department with fresh data to make informed decisions and automatically optimize our advertising,” said Cooper McGuire, MD, Zalora. “Additionally, Amazon Redshift is simple to use and reliable. With one click, we can rapidly scale up or down in real time in alignment with business requirements. We have been able to eliminate significant maintenance costs and overhead associated with traditional solutions and external consultants.”