Do you have huge data to analyze, such as for the performance of your applications? If yes, you are at the right place to learn about AWS Redshift one of the most widely used AWS services to analyze the data.

AWS Redshift service allows storing terabytes of data and analyzing the data, and the service is AWS Redshift.

In this tutorial, you will learn about Amazon’s data warehouse and analytic service, AWS Redshift, and how to create an AWS Redshift cluster using the AWS Management console.

Let’s get started.

Table of Content

1. What is AWS Redshift?
2. AWS Redshift Cluster
3. Prerequisites
4. Creating AWS IAM role for AWS Redshift Cluster
5. How to Create AWS Redshift Cluster using AWS Management console
6. Conclusion

What is AWS Redshift?

AWS Redshift is an AWS analytical service that allows you to store huge amounts of data and analyze queries on the database. It is a fully managed service, so you don’t need to worry about scalability and infrastructure.

To upload the data in the AWS Redshift cluster, first, you need to create the set of nodes, and later, you can start analyzing the data. AWS Redshift manages everything for you, such as monitoring, scaling, applying patches, upgrades, capacity, whatever is required at the infrastructure end.

AWS Redshift Cluster

AWS Redshift cluster contains a single node or more than one node, depending on the requirements. If you wish to create more than one node, then that is known as a cluster. AWS Redshift Cluster contains one leader node, and other nodes are known as compute nodes.

You can create an AWS Redshift cluster using various ways such as AWS Command Line Interface ( AWS CLI ), AWS Management Console, and AWS SDK’s ( Software Development kit) libraries.

• AWS Redshift cluster snapshots can be created either manually or automatically & are stored in AWS S3 bucket.
• AWS CloudWwatch is used to capture health and performance of AWS Redshift cluster.
• As soon as you create Amazon Redshift cluster one database is also created. This database is used to query and analyze the data. While you provision the cluster you need to provide master user which is superuser for the database & has all rights.
• When a client queries Redshift cluster all the request are received by leader node , it further parses and develop query execution plans. Leader node coordinates with compute node and then provide final results to clients.

Prerequisites

• You must have AWS account in order to setup AWS Redshift cluster. If you don’t have AWS account, please create a account from here AWS account.
• It will be great if you have admin rights on AWS cloud else you must have access to create IAM role and AWS Redshift cluster.

Creating AWS IAM role for AWS Redshift Cluster

Before creating an AWS Redshift cluster, let’s create an IAM role that Redshift will assume to work with other services such as AWS S3, etc. Let’s quickly dive in and create an IAM role.

• Open your browser and and go to AWS Management console and on the top search for IAM , here click on Roles

• Next click on Create Role to create a new IAM role.

• Now select AWS service as Redshift as highlighted below.

• Further scroll down to the bottom and you will see “Select your use case”, here choose Redshift – Customizable, then choose Next: Permissions. This allowss AWS Redshift to connect to other AWS services such as AWS S3.

• Now attach AmazonS3ReadOnlyAccess policy and click Next. This policy allows AWS Redshift to access AWS S3 bucket where you will store the data.

• Next skip tagging as of now just click on Next: Tags and then Review & finally click on Create Role.

IAM role is created successfully; keep the IAM role ARN handy, which you will use in the next section.

How to Create AWS Redshift Cluster using AWS Management console

Now that you have an IAM role successfully created for the AWS Redshift cluster, let’s move on and learn how to create an AWS Redshift Cluster using the AWS Management console.

• On the AWS Management console search for Redshift on the top of the page.

• Next click on create a free trial Cluster and provide the name of cluster as redshift-cluster-1.

• Further provide the database details such as admin username and password and save them for future. Also Associate IAM role that you cretad in previous secion.

• Finally click on Create cluster

The AWS Redshift cluster is created successfully and available for use.

• Lets validate the database connection by running a simple query. Click on Query data

• Provide the database credentials for connecting to AWS Redshift cluster.
  • Note: dev database was created by default in the AWS Cluster

• Now Rrun a query as below. The query will be executed as there some tables already created by default inside the database like events, date etc.

select * from date

AWS Redshift Cluster is created successfully, and the queries are successfully executed in the database.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned about Amazon’s data warehouse and analytic service, AWS Redshift, AWS Redshift cluster is, and how to create an AWS Redshift cluster using the AWS Management console.

Now that you have the newly launched AWS Redshift, what do you plan to store and analyze?