Amazon Redshift: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 1. AWS for Data

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

Sherlock Holmes

Data is ubiquitous and powers everything we do today. Who would have thought you could generate data just by walking and monitor your steps in real time on your wrist as you call your friend? From mobile phones, smartwatches, and web clicks to the Internet of Things (IoT), we are generating various types of data in abundance, and organizations are faced with the challenge of deriving meaning out of all of this data to deliver insights. You have to analyze this data to present unbiased information in a simple way for leaders to make business decisions. Data is the underlying force that fuels the insights and predictions that lead to better decision making and innovation. Although challenging, it is imperative that you harness this data and reinvent your business to stay relevant now and in the future. Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte (PB)-scale data warehouse service in the cloud that powers a modern data architecture to store data from all sources in a centralized or decentralized architecture. It enables you to query data across your data warehouses, data lakes, and operational databases to gain faster and deeper insights not possible otherwise.

In this chapter, we will cover the core tenants of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) for data framework including what makes “Data-Driven Organizations” successful, the core tenants of a “Modern Data Strategy”, and what goes into ...