Amazon Redshift introduces RG instances with AWS Graviton technology

Amazon Redshift has announced the general availability of its new RG instances, a next-generation series of provisioned cluster nodes powered by AWS Graviton processors. These new instances are designed to enhance performance, delivering data warehouse and data lake workloads up to 2.4 times faster than the preceding RA3 instances, while offering a 30% reduction in price per vCPU.

The RG instances feature Redshift’s proprietary vectorized data lake query engine, which processes Apache Iceberg and Parquet data directly on cluster nodes. This integration allows users to perform SQL analytics across both data warehouses and data lakes using a single engine, eliminating the need for the separate Redshift Spectrum scanning fleet and its associated per-terabyte charges.

For users running structured data warehouse workloads on Redshift Managed Storage or querying open-format data lake tables in Amazon S3, RG instances offer substantial performance gains. Specifically, they are up to 2.2 times faster for data warehouse tasks, 2.4 times faster for Apache Iceberg queries, and 1.5 times faster for Parquet workloads.

The data lake engine is equipped with a purpose-built I/O subsystem that includes smart prefetch, NVMe caching, vectorized Parquet scans, and advanced file and partition-level pruning. The Just-in-Time (JIT) Analyze feature ensures consistently fast queries by automatically updating table statistics as data and workload patterns change. Additionally, intelligent NVMe caching keeps frequently accessed datasets close to compute resources, minimizing the need for repeated data lake round-trips and improving response times.

RG instances are initially available in two sizes, rg.xlarge and rg.4xlarge. Current RA3 cluster users can transition to RG instances using methods such as Snapshot & Restore, Elastic Resize, or Classic Resize. Various pricing options are available, including On-Demand and 1-year or 3-year Reserved Instances with No Upfront payment. For more detailed pricing information, users are encouraged to visit the Amazon Redshift pricing page.

The new RG instances are now accessible in several AWS Regions, including US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon and N. California), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), and numerous locations across Europe and the Asia Pacific. To begin using RG instances, users can refer to resources such as the Amazon Redshift RG Instance Documentation, the RA3 to RG Upgrade Guide, and the Amazon Redshift Pricing page.