Amazon Web Services, Inc. today announced that Amazon Redshift, a managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud, is now broadly available for use.

Since Amazon Redshift was announced at the AWS re: Invent conference in November 2012, customers using the service during the limited preview have ranged from startups to global enterprises, with datasets from terabytes to petabytes, across industries including social, gaming, mobile, advertising, manufacturing, healthcare, e-commerce, and financial services.

Traditional data warehouses require significant time and resource to administer. In addition, the financial cost associated with building, maintaining, and growing self-managed, on-premise data warehouses is very high. Amazon Redshift aims to lower the cost of a data warehouse and make it easy to analyze large amounts of data very quickly.

Amazon Redshift uses columnar data storage, advanced compression, and high performance IO and network to achieve higher performance than traditional databases for data warehousing and analytics workloads. Redshift is currently available in the US East (N. Virginia) Region and will be rolled out to other AWS Regions in the coming months.

“When we set out to build Amazon Redshift, we wanted to leverage the massive scale of AWS to deliver ten times the performance at 1/10 the cost of on-premise data warehouses in use today,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President of Database Services, Amazon Web Services. “With order of magnitude improvements in price/performance, Amazon Redshift makes big data analytics accessible to more people, allowing large organizations to analyze more of their data and smaller ones to afford fast, scalable data warehousing technology. We are delighted by the excitement from our preview customers as they’ve experienced the performance improvement and lower costs that Amazon Redshift delivers.”

Hundreds of customers participated in the Amazon Redshift limited preview, and the benefits most frequently cited were lower cost, improved performance, and freedom from having to manage an on premise data warehouse.

In the ten weeks since Amazon Redshift was announced, AWS technology software partners including SAP, IBM, Informatica, Tableau, Attunity, Actuate, Pentaho, Talend, Birst, Roambi and Pervasive have joined MicroStrategy and Jaspersoft in enabling customers to continue using the tools they do today. Technology consulting companies including Capgemini, Cognizant, and Full360 have consultants ready to help customers with their Amazon Redshift implementations.

"Having implemented many large-scale data management solutions, we are excited to use Amazon Redshift to deliver high performance, large scale, and extremely low cost managed information systems to our clients,” said Karthik Krishnamurthy, Global Head Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing for Cognizant.