At its re:Invent conference, AWS today announced that four of its cloud-based analytics services, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR, Amazon MSK and Amazon Kinesis, are now available as serverless and on-demand services. That’s something AWS’s customers have been asking for, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said in today’s keynote. These new services are now available as public previews.
As Selipsky argued, some AWS competitors may argue that one database can just do it all, but he argues that different workloads need the right databases to back them — and he argued that the same is true for analytics services. But customers also don’t want to have to worry about the infrastructure that comes with running these services — and in addition to doing away with having to manage clusters, users will also only have to pay for the resources they use. For Redshift, for example, that means users will only pay when the data warehouse is in use, not when it sits idle.
“Amazon Redshift Serverless automatically provisions the right compute resources for you to get started,” AWS’ Danilo Poccia explains in today’s announcement. “As your demand evolves with more concurrent users and new workloads, your data warehouse scales seamlessly and automatically to adapt to the changes. You can optionally specify the base data warehouse size to have additional control on cost and application-specific SLAs.”
Similary, Kinesis, AWS’ service for handling streaming data, now offers a fully managed on-demand mode. With this new capacity mode, the service can automatically scale according to data traffic.
With this move today, AWS is clearly reacting to market pressure. A lot of its competitors now offer similar serverless analytics offerings, as do a number of well-funded startups.
