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2.4x Faster, 30% Cheaper! Redshift RG Instances Arrive in Zurich

AWS What's New ★★ View Markdown
#aws#infrastructure

Hi, it's me, Shiichan! Today's news is good news for anyone running a data warehouse.

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

AWS What's New announced that Amazon Redshift RG instances, powered by AWS Graviton processors, are now available in the Europe (Zurich) region.

The story so far

Until now, RG instances weren't available in Zurich, so teams there had to rely on previous-generation instances like RA3. This regional expansion means Zurich-based workloads can now benefit from the newer instance generation too.

What changes

RG instances bring real performance gains over RA3:

  • Speed: data warehouse and data lake workloads run up to 2.4x faster
  • Cost: 30% lower price per vCPU

They also include a custom-built vectorized data lake query engine that processes Apache Iceberg and Parquet data directly on cluster nodes, so you can run SQL analytics across both your data warehouse and data lake through a single engine.

Dive Deep

RG instances come in four sizes: rg.large, rg.xlarge, rg.4xlarge, and rg.12xlarge. If you're running an existing RA3 cluster, you can upgrade using Snapshot & Restore, Elastic Resize, or Classic Resize.

Pricing includes On-Demand as well as 1-year and 3-year Reserved Instances, with All Upfront, Partial Upfront, and No Upfront payment options. Check the Amazon Redshift pricing page for details, and the RA3 to RG Upgrade Guide for the upgrade steps.

Wrap-up

  • Amazon Redshift RG instances are now available in the Europe (Zurich) region.
  • They run up to 2.4x faster than RA3 at 30% lower price per vCPU.
  • A single engine can now analyze both data warehouse and data lake formats like Apache Iceberg and Parquet.
  • Existing RA3 clusters can upgrade via Snapshot & Restore, Elastic Resize, or Classic Resize.
  • A nice win on both cost and performance for data engineers running Redshift out of Zurich.

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