Redshift Spectrum

Sometimes enterprises want to analyze their data without moving it into the AWS Redshift database. Now they can.

Redshift Spectrum, released in preview, extends the power of Redshift's query engine to query exabytes of unstructured data sitting in basic S3 storage. That gives customers the ability to create applications that use the same query language to access different, often less-critical data sets, Vogels said.

It's an appealing product to large data lake users, both when considering speed and costs, said Jarrod Levitan, chief cloud officer of TriNimbus, an AWS partner based in Vancouver, Canada.

Redshift Spectrum "offers a pure pay-for-usage model, separating compute from storage," Levitan said. "If you architect your data warehouse well, you could save a lot on Redshift costs."