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Amazon RDS for Aurora vs Amazon Redshift: What are the differences?
Amazon RDS for Aurora: MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible relational database with several times better performance. Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible, relational database engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Amazon Aurora provides up to five times better performance than MySQL at a price point one tenth that of a commercial database while delivering similar performance and availability; Amazon Redshift: Fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service. Redshift makes it simple and cost-effective to efficiently analyze all your data using your existing business intelligence tools. It is optimized for datasets ranging from a few hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and costs less than $1,000 per terabyte per year, a tenth the cost of most traditional data warehousing solutions.
Amazon RDS for Aurora and Amazon Redshift are primarily classified as "SQL Database as a Service" and "Big Data as a Service" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by Amazon RDS for Aurora are:
- High Throughput with Low Jitter
- Push-button Compute Scaling
- Storage Auto-scaling
On the other hand, Amazon Redshift provides the following key features:
- Optimized for Data Warehousing- It uses columnar storage, data compression, and zone maps to reduce the amount of IO needed to perform queries. Redshift has a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture, parallelizing and distributing SQL operations to take advantage of all available resources.
- Scalable- With a few clicks of the AWS Management Console or a simple API call, you can easily scale the number of nodes in your data warehouse up or down as your performance or capacity needs change.
- No Up-Front Costs- You pay only for the resources you provision. You can choose On-Demand pricing with no up-front costs or long-term commitments, or obtain significantly discounted rates with Reserved Instance pricing.
"MySQL compatibility " is the top reason why over 11 developers like Amazon RDS for Aurora, while over 27 developers mention "Data Warehousing" as the leading cause for choosing Amazon Redshift.
According to the StackShare community, Amazon Redshift has a broader approval, being mentioned in 269 company stacks & 67 developers stacks; compared to Amazon RDS for Aurora, which is listed in 121 company stacks and 31 developer stacks.
We need to perform ETL from several databases into a data warehouse or data lake. We want to
- keep raw and transformed data available to users to draft their own queries efficiently
- give users the ability to give custom permissions and SSO
- move between open-source on-premises development and cloud-based production environments
We want to use inexpensive Amazon EC2 instances only on medium-sized data set 16GB to 32GB feeding into Tableau Server or PowerBI for reporting and data analysis purposes.
You could also use AWS Lambda and use Cloudwatch event schedule if you know when the function should be triggered. The benefit is that you could use any language and use the respective database client.
But if you orchestrate ETLs then it makes sense to use Apache Airflow. This requires Python knowledge.
Though we have always built something custom, Apache airflow (https://airflow.apache.org/) stood out as a key contender/alternative when it comes to open sources. On the commercial offering, Amazon Redshift combined with Amazon Kinesis (for complex manipulations) is great for BI, though Redshift as such is expensive.
You may want to look into a Data Virtualization product called Conduit. It connects to disparate data sources in AWS, on prem, Azure, GCP, and exposes them as a single unified Spark SQL view to PowerBI (direct query) or Tableau. Allows auto query and caching policies to enhance query speeds and experience. Has a GPU query engine and optimized Spark for fallback. Can be deployed on your AWS VM or on prem, scales up and out. Sounds like the ideal solution to your needs.
Cloud Data-warehouse is the centerpiece of modern Data platform. The choice of the most suitable solution is therefore fundamental.
Our benchmark was conducted over BigQuery and Snowflake. These solutions seem to match our goals but they have very different approaches.
BigQuery is notably the only 100% serverless cloud data-warehouse, which requires absolutely NO maintenance: no re-clustering, no compression, no index optimization, no storage management, no performance management. Snowflake requires to set up (paid) reclustering processes, to manage the performance allocated to each profile, etc. We can also mention Redshift, which we have eliminated because this technology requires even more ops operation.
BigQuery can therefore be set up with almost zero cost of human resources. Its on-demand pricing is particularly adapted to small workloads. 0 cost when the solution is not used, only pay for the query you're running. But quickly the use of slots (with monthly or per-minute commitment) will drastically reduce the cost of use. We've reduced by 10 the cost of our nightly batches by using flex slots.
Finally, a major advantage of BigQuery is its almost perfect integration with Google Cloud Platform services: Cloud functions, Dataflow, Data Studio, etc.
BigQuery is still evolving very quickly. The next milestone, BigQuery Omni, will allow to run queries over data stored in an external Cloud platform (Amazon S3 for example). It will be a major breakthrough in the history of cloud data-warehouses. Omni will compensate a weakness of BigQuery: transferring data in near real time from S3 to BQ is not easy today. It was even simpler to implement via Snowflake's Snowpipe solution.
We also plan to use the Machine Learning features built into BigQuery to accelerate our deployment of Data-Science-based projects. An opportunity only offered by the BigQuery solution
Pros of Amazon Aurora
- MySQL compatibility14
- Better performance12
- Easy read scalability10
- Speed8
- Low latency read replica7
- High IOPS cost2
- Good cost performance1
Pros of Amazon Redshift
- Data Warehousing40
- Scalable27
- SQL17
- Backed by Amazon14
- Encryption5
- Cheap and reliable1
- Isolation1
- Best Cloud DW Performance1
- Fast columnar storage1
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Cons of Amazon Aurora
- Vendor locking2
- Rigid schema1
Cons of Amazon Redshift
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What is Amazon Aurora?
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