Redshift

Question 1

What is Amazon Redshift?

Answer 1

Amazon Redshift is a fast, powerful, fully-managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud.

Question 2

What, at a high level, is the financial benefit of using Redshift?

Answer 2

• Customers start at $0.25/hr with no commitments or upfront costs
• and scale to a petabyte or more for $1000/terrabyte/yr, less than one tenth of most other data warehousing solutions

Question 3

What is the storage available when Amazon Redshift is configured for Single Node?

Answer 3

160GB

Question 4

What is the setup for Multi-Node AWS Redshift?

Answer 4

• A Leader Node that manages clinet connections and receives queries
• Compute Nodes that store data and perform queries and computations

Question 5

What is the maximum number of compute nodes you can have in Redshift?

Answer 5

128

Question 6

What are two built-in ways that Amazon Redshift maximizes performance?

Answer 6

• Advanced Compression based around columns
• Massive Parallel Processing

Question 7

What does MPP stand for?

Answer 7

Massive Parallel Processing

Question 8

Are AWS Redshift Backups enabled by default?

Answer 8

Yes, with a 1-day retention period

Question 9

What is the maximum retention period for AWS Redshift Backups?

Answer 9

35 days

Question 10

What does AWS Redshift do to help ensure redundancy?

Answer 10

It always tries to maintain at least 3 copies of the data

• Original
• replica on the compute nodes
• a backup in S3

Question 11

What does AWS Redshift do to help with disaster recovery of your data?

Answer 11

It can asynchronously replicate your snapshots to S3 in another region

Question 12

What is the pricing model for AWS Redshift?

Answer 12

• Backups
• Data Transfer (w/in VPC Only, not outside)
• Compute Node Hours = total number of hours run across all compute nodes in the given billing period (you are NOT charged for leader node hours)

Question 13

How does AWS Redshift account for security considerations?

Answer 13

• Communications with Redshift are encrypted in transit using SSL
• encrypted at rest using AES-256
• By default, Redshift takes care of Key Management
  
  • but, you CAN manage your own keys through an HSM and KMS

Question 14

What does HSM stand for?

Answer 14

Hardware Security Module

Question 15

How does Redshift handle availability concerns?

Answer 15

• Currently, Redshift is only available in 1 AZ
• You can restore snapshots to new AZs in the event of an outage (these are called cross-region snapshots)