According to the announcement, Amazon Redshift handles all of the work of setting up and managing a data warehouse – including such tasks as provisioning capacity, monitoring and backing up the cluster, and applying patches and upgrades.

According to the company, customers can launch a Redshift cluster with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. Amazon Redshift is available with two underlying node types including either 2TB or 16TB of compressed customer data per node. One cluster can scale up to 100 nodes, and on-demand pricing starts at just US$ 0.85 per hour for a 2TB data warehouse. On-demand pricing lets you pay for capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments and no upfront costs. However, Amazon’s “Heavy Utilization Reserved Instance” pricing offers significant savings over an on-demand approach. According to the website, such reserved instances are most appropriate for steady-state production workloads that will be always running.

The Amazon Redshift service offers high performance and reliability through the use of columnar data storage, advanced compression, and distribution and parallelization of queries across a cluster of inexpensive nodes. Additionally, all data written to a node in your cluster is automatically replicated to other nodes within the cluster and is continuously backed up to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

Amazon Redshift is integrated with other AWS services, including Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB. Support for Amazon Relational Database Service and Amazon Elastic MapReduce is expected in the future.