Amazon Redshift vs Amazon S3: What are the differences?

Developers describe Amazon Redshift as "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. On the other hand, Amazon S3 is detailed as "Store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web". Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.

Amazon Redshift belongs to "Big Data as a Service" category of the tech stack, while Amazon S3 can be primarily classified under "Cloud Storage".

Some of the features offered by Amazon Redshift are:

• 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.

On the other hand, Amazon S3 provides the following key features:

• Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 terabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.
• Each object is stored in a bucket and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.
• A bucket can be stored in one of several Regions. You can choose a Region to optimize for latency, minimize costs, or address regulatory requirements. Amazon S3 is currently available in the US Standard, US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Sydney), South America (Sao Paulo), and GovCloud (US) Regions. The US Standard Region automatically routes requests to facilities in Northern Virginia or the Pacific Northwest using network maps.

"Data Warehousing" is the primary reason why developers consider Amazon Redshift over the competitors, whereas "Reliable" was stated as the key factor in picking Amazon S3.

According to the StackShare community, Amazon S3 has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3235 company stacks & 1616 developers stacks; compared to Amazon Redshift, which is listed in 270 company stacks and 68 developer stacks.