Amazon Redshift 24 descends from ParAccel's massively parallel columnar engine. Provisioned clusters are sets of nodes billed per node-hour, from $0.543 an hour on demand, with reserved instances for one- or three-year discounts; current node types keep data in Redshift Managed Storage on S3, cached on local SSD, at $0.024 per GB-month. Redshift Serverless bills Redshift Processing Units (1 RPU = 16 GB of memory) at $0.375 per RPU-hour, per second with a 60-second minimum, and nothing while idle. Base capacity defaults to 128 RPU and can be set from 4 RPU (for under 32 TB, an effective floor of $1.50 an hour) up to 512, or 1,024 in some regions.
Distribution and sort keys play the role of partitioning and clustering. The distribution key co-locates rows that join, and a good sort key lets the engine skip blocks by their zone maps:
CREATE TABLE fact_sales (
order_id INT, line_no SMALLINT, order_date DATE, book_key INT, customer_key INT,
qty SMALLINT, gross_amount DECIMAL(10,2))
DISTKEY (customer_key) -- rows for one customer on one slice: local joins
SORTKEY (order_date); -- date filters skip whole blocksConcurrency scaling adds clusters for bursts, free for up to an hour a day. New accounts get a $300 credit valid for 90 days, which is how to try Redshift without a bill.