Local development and staging with Amazon Redshift

Question

I like to set up tools and services with production, staging, and local development. I\'d like to use Amazon Redshift, and starting at $180 a month seems pretty reasonable for a

Answer 1

Amazon Redshift was specifically created to run on AWS infrastructure. It is not available as a download. (Interestingly, Amazon DynamoDB does have a downloadable version for development purposes.)

The cheapest option might be to shutdown your Dev & Test instances each night and on weekends. Take a snapshot before deleting the cluster, then create a cluster the next morning based on the snapshot. This can be automated via the AWS Command-Line Interface (CLI), making it easy to schedule with cron or Scheduled Tasks.

You could also have a snapshot of Test data and restore that snapshot each morning, which means the test database doesn't fill-up with test cases.

Another cost saving might be to reduce the number of nodes for the non-production systems. Queries will run slower and the total amount of storage will be reduced, but it could be more cost-effective. Or even use a "Dense Storage" 2TB node instead of several "Dense Compute" SSD instances -- they will provide more storage on less nodes.