Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) vs. Amazon Redshift

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon S3
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Amazon S3 is a cloud-based object storage service from Amazon Web Services. It's key features are storage management and monitoring, access management and security, data querying, and data transfer.N/A
Amazon Redshift
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Redshift is a hosted data warehouse solution, from Amazon Web Services.
$0.24
per GB per month
Pricing
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Amazon Redshift
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Redshift Managed Storage
$0.24
per GB per month
Current Generation
$0.25 - $13.04
per hour
Previous Generation
$0.25 - $4.08
per hour
Redshift Spectrum
$5.00
per terabyte of data scanned
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon S3Amazon Redshift
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Amazon Redshift
Considered Both Products
Amazon S3
Chose Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
S3 is sort of the de-facto standard for cloud-based storage right now, so it's hard to have a great basis of comparison. Google's drive and cloud offerings are fairly similar in functionality, although I would say the AWS management console is a lot easier to interact with than …
Chose Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Amazon S3 is where you want to default to if you want to store a large amount of data. Compared to formatted data that you can store in Amazon RDS or DynamoDB, you can store your data in any format you want on S3. And the data retention policy can be really useful if you use S3 …
Amazon Redshift
Chose Amazon Redshift
We are currently on Redshift, because it was out before Snowflake. However, Snowflake looks promising. It's the new shiny toy that gives options that Redshift does not provide for. The big thing is that storage and compute can be scaled separately, whereas you cannot do that in …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Amazon Redshift
Data Center Backup
Comparison of Data Center Backup features of Product A and Product B
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
9.7
2 Ratings
13% above category average
Amazon Redshift
-
Ratings
Universal recovery9.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Instant recovery9.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Recovery verification10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Multiple backup destinations10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Backup to the cloud10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Snapshots10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Flexible deployment10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Management dashboard7.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform support10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Retention options10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Encryption10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Enterprise Backup
Comparison of Enterprise Backup features of Product A and Product B
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
9.5
2 Ratings
16% above category average
Amazon Redshift
-
Ratings
Continuous data protection10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Replication10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Operational reporting and analytics8.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Multi-location capabilities10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Amazon Redshift
Small Businesses
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
Score 9.6 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise
Score 9.7 out of 10
Snowflake
Snowflake
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise
Score 9.7 out of 10
Snowflake
Snowflake
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Amazon Redshift
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(68 ratings)
8.0
(37 ratings)
Usability
8.1
(10 ratings)
10.0
(9 ratings)
Support Rating
9.8
(21 ratings)
9.0
(7 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Amazon Redshift
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
Amazon S3 is a great service to safely backup your data where redundancy is guaranteed and the cost is fair. We use Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Transferring data into Amazon S3 is free but transferring data out has an associated, albeit low, cost per GB. This needs to be kept in mind if you plan on transferring out a lot of data frequently. There may be other cost effective options although Amazon S3 prices are really low per GB. Transferring 150TB would cost approximately $50 per month.
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Amazon AWS
If the number of connections is expected to be low, but the amounts of data are large or projected to grow it is a good solutions especially if there is previous exposure to PostgreSQL. Speaking of Postgres, Redshift is based on several versions old releases of PostgreSQL so the developers would not be able to take advantage of some of the newer SQL language features. The queries need some fine-tuning still, indexing is not provided, but playing with sorting keys becomes necessary. Lastly, there is no notion of the Primary Key in Redshift so the business must be prepared to explain why duplication occurred (must be vigilant for)
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Fantastic developer API, including AWS command line and library utilities.
  • Strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, especially with regards to access permissions.
  • It's astoundingly stable- you can trust it'll stay online and available for anywhere in the world.
  • Its static website hosting feature is a hidden gem-- it provides perhaps the cheapest, most stable, most high-performing static web hosting available in PaaS.
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Amazon AWS
  • [Amazon] Redshift has Distribution Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables, it improves Query performance. For instance, we can define Mapping/Meta-data tables with Distribution-All Key, so that it gets replicated across all the nodes, for fast joins and fast query results.
  • [Amazon] Redshift has Sort Keys. If you correctly define them on your tables along with above Distribution Keys, it further improves your Query performance. It also has Composite Sort Keys and Interleaved Sort Keys, to support various use cases
  • [Amazon] Redshift is forked out of PostgreSQL DB, and then AWS added "MPP" (Massively Parallel Processing) and "Column Oriented" concepts to it, to make it a powerful data store.
  • [Amazon] Redshift has "Analyze" operation that could be performed on tables, which will update the stats of the table in leader node. This is sort of a ledger about which data is stored in which node and which partition with in a node. Up to date stats improves Query performance.
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Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Web console can be very confusing and challenging to use, especially for new users
  • Bucket policies are very flexible, but the composability of the security rules can be very confusing to get right, often leading to security rules in use on buckets other than what you believe they are
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Amazon AWS
  • We've experienced some problems with hanging queries on Redshift Spectrum/external tables. We've had to roll back to and old version of Redshift while we wait for AWS to provide a patch.
  • Redshift's dialect is most similar to that of PostgreSQL 8. It lacks many modern features and data types.
  • Constraints are not enforced. We must rely on other means to verify the integrity of transformed tables.
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Usability
Amazon AWS
It is tricky to get it all set up correctly with policies and getting the IAM settings right. There is also a lot of lifecycle config you can do in terms of moving data to cold/glacier storage. It is also not to be confused with being a OneDrive or SharePoint replacement, they each have their own place in our environment, and S3 is used more by the IT team and accessed by our PHP applications. It is not necessarily used by an average everyday user for storing their pictures or documents, etc.
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Amazon AWS
Just very happy with the product, it fits our needs perfectly. Amazon pioneered the cloud and we have had a positive experience using RedShift. Really cool to be able to see your data housed and to be able to query and perform administrative tasks with ease.
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
AWS has always been quick to resolve any support ticket raised. S3 is no exception. We have only ever used it once to get a clarification regarding the costs involved when data is transferred between S3 and other AWS services or the public internet. We got a response from AWS support team within a day.
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Amazon AWS
The support was great and helped us in a timely fashion. We did use a lot of online forums as well, but the official documentation was an ongoing one, and it did take more time for us to look through it. We would have probably chosen a competitor product had it not been for the great support
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
Overall, we found that Amazon S3 provided a lot of backend features Google Cloud Storage (GCS) simply couldn't compare to. GCS was way more expensive and really did not live up to it. In terms of setup, Google Cloud Storage may have Amazon S3 beat, however, as it is more of a pseudo advanced version of Google Drive, that was not a hard feat for it to achieve. Overall, evaluating GCS, in comparison to S3, was an utter disappointment.
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Amazon AWS
Than Vertica: Redshift is cheaper and AWS integrated (which was a plus because the whole company was on AWS).
Than BigQuery: Redshift has a standard SQL interface, though recently I heard good things about BigQuery and would try it out again.
Than Hive: Hive is great if you are in the PB+ range, but latencies tend to be much slower than Redshift and it is not suited for ad-hoc applications.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Amazon AWS
Redshift is relatively cheaper tool but since the pricing is dynamic, there is always a risk of exceeding the cost. Since most of our team is using it as self serve and there is no continuous tracking by a dedicated team, it really needs time & effort on analyst's side to know how much it is going to cost.
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • It practically eliminated some real heavy storage servers from our premises and reduced maintenance cost.
  • The excellent durability and reliability make sure the return of money you invested in.
  • If the objects which are not active or stale, one needs to remove them. Those objects keep adding cost to each billing cycle. If you are handling a really big infrastructure, sometimes this creates quite a huge bill for preserving un-necessary objects/documents.
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Amazon AWS
  • Our company is moving to the AWS infrastructure, and in this context moving the warehouse environments to Redshift sounds logical regardless of the cost.
  • Development organizations have to operate in the Dev/Ops mode where they build and support their apps at the same time.
  • Hard to estimate the overall ROI of moving to Redshift from my position. However, running Redshift seems to be inexpensive compared to all the licensing and hardware costs we had on our RDBMS platform before Redshift.
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ScreenShots