Amazon RDS vs Amazon Redshift: What are the differences?

Amazon RDS: Set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Amazon RDS gives you access to the capabilities of a familiar MySQL, Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server database engine. This means that the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing databases can be used with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period and enabling point-in-time recovery. You benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your Database Instance (DB Instance) via a single API call; 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 can be classified as a tool in the "SQL Database as a Service" category, while Amazon Redshift is grouped under "Big Data as a Service".

Some of the features offered by Amazon RDS are:

• Pre-configured Parameters
• Monitoring and Metrics
• Automatic Software Patching

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.

"Reliable failovers" is the primary reason why developers consider Amazon RDS over the competitors, whereas "Data Warehousing" was stated as the key factor in picking Amazon Redshift.

Airbnb, Netflix, and Coursera are some of the popular companies that use Amazon RDS, whereas Amazon Redshift is used by Lyft, Coursera, and 9GAG. Amazon RDS has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1437 company stacks & 526 developers stacks; compared to Amazon Redshift, which is listed in 270 company stacks and 68 developer stacks.