Amazon Redshift Serverless at 4 RPUs: High-value analytics at low cost

Organizations across industries struggle with the economics of data analytics. High entry costs, complex capacity planning, and unpredictable workload demands create barriers that prevent teams from accessing the insights they need. Small businesses abandon analytics initiatives due to prohibitive minimums, and enterprises overprovision resources for development environments, leading to inefficient spending.

Amazon Redshift Serverless now addresses these challenges with 4 RPU configurations, helping you get started with a lower base capacity that runs scalable analytics workloads beginning at $1.50 per hour. This new option transforms the economics of data analytics with the flexibility to scale up automatically based on workload demands. You only pay for the compute capacity you consume, calculated on a per-second basis.

With 64 GB of memory and support for up to 32 TB of managed storage, this lower entry point offering addresses several common customer needs, including development and test environments that maintain separate workloads at lower cost and production workloads with variable demand that need cost-effective scaling. The configuration is particularly useful for test and development environments, departmental data warehouses, periodic reporting workloads, gaming analytics, and data mesh architectures with unpredictable usage patterns. Organizations just starting with cloud analytics can use this low-cost option while getting access to enterprise features like automatic scaling, built-in security, and seamless data lake integration.In this post, we examine how this new sizing option makes Redshift Serverless accessible to smaller organizations while providing enterprises with cost-effective environments for development, testing, and variable workloads.

New 4 RPU minimum base capacity in Redshift Serverless

Redshift Serverless measures compute capacity using Redshift Processing Units (RPUs), where each RPU provides 16 GB of memory. With this new minimum base capacity, the 4 RPU configuration delivers a total of 64 GB of memory. It supports up to 32 TB of managed storage, with a maximum of 100 columns per table. The 4 RPU configuration is cost-efficient, and it’s designed for lighter workloads. When your workload requires additional resources, Redshift Serverless automatically scales up the compute capacity. After you have scaled beyond 4 RPUs, your data warehouse will continue using the higher RPU level to maintain consistent performance. This behavior provides workload stability while preserving the benefits of automatic scaling.

For workloads requiring more resources, such as tables with a large number of columns or higher concurrency requirements, you can choose higher base capacities ranging from 8 RPUs up to 1024 RPUs. This flexibility helps you start small and adjust your resources as your analytics requirements evolve.

Benefits of Redshift Serverless with 4 RPUs

This new feature offers the following benefits:

• Cost-effective entry point – The new 4 RPU configuration is a low-cost option for cloud data warehousing, making enterprise-grade analytics accessible to organizations of various sizes, such as startups exploring their first data warehouse or established enterprises optimizing their analytics spending. For example, in the US East (N. Virginia) Region, the compute cost is $0.375 per RPU-hour. For a 4 RPU base capacity, this translates to $1.50 per hour of active workload time. Because you’re only charged when workloads are running, small-scale users can keep costs predictable and low. This configuration helps teams begin their analytics journey with minimal upfront commitment. Development teams can maintain dedicated environments for testing and experimentation without significant cost overhead.
• Support for smaller datasets – With support for up to 32 TB of Redshift Managed Storage, the 4 RPU configuration is well-suited for smaller data warehouses. It can handle datasets ranging from a few gigabytes to tens of terabytes, making it ideal for startups, small businesses, or departments with limited data volumes.
• Seamless integration with the AWS ecosystem – The 4 RPU configuration integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for data lakes, AWS Glue for ETL (extract, transform, and load), and Amazon QuickSight for visualization. This makes it straightforward to build end-to-end analytics pipelines, even for smaller-scale projects. Additionally, Redshift data lake queries on external Amazon S3 data are included in the RPU billing, simplifying cost management.
• Use case flexibility – The 4 RPU configuration proves valuable across numerous analytics scenarios. Development and testing environments benefit from cost-effective isolation, and departmental data warehouses can start small and scale as needed. Organizations running periodic reporting workloads or proof-of-concept projects can optimize costs by paying only for actual usage. Even small to medium-sized production workloads can use this configuration effectively.

Regardless of the use case, you can benefit from the full feature set of Redshift Serverless, including built-in security, data lake integration, and automated maintenance.

Use cases for Redshift Serverless with 4 RPU workgroups

The 4 RPU configuration is tailored for scenarios where lightweight compute resources suffice. The following are some practical use cases:

• Small business analytics – Small businesses with limited data (less than 32 GB) can analyze sales, customer behavior, or operational metrics with cost-effective data warehouses. Running 10–20 daily ETL queries and occasional one-time queries remains cost-effective at this capacity.
• Development and testing environments – The configuration is well-suited for development and test environments where full production resources aren’t needed. Data engineers can experiment with Redshift Serverless, prototype queries, or build proof-of-concept solutions without committing to higher RPU capacities. The 4 RPU configuration lowers the cost of continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) testing of data pipelines. Teams can run automated integration tests and schema validations in isolated environments that mirror production systems while optimizing costs through per-second billing.
• Analytics for startups – Startups can build robust product analytics capabilities without significant upfront investment. Teams can track customer behavior, feature adoption, and KPIs using familiar SQL queries, then connect business intelligence (BI) tools like Quicksight or Tableau for lightweight dashboarding.
• Training and experimentation – Organizations can create dedicated sandbox environments for data analysts’ onboarding and experimentation with minimal budget impact. These environments are perfect for exploring analytics powered by large language models (LLMs), semantic layer development, or generative AI applications.
• Data quality workflows – The feature efficiently supports scheduled jobs for data quality validation, checking data freshness, integrity, and conformance without dedicating high-capacity environments to routine QA tasks.
• Enterprise team enablement – Large organizations can implement decentralized data warehousing strategies. Each department can operate its data warehouse aligned with specific needs and budgets, enabling department-level chargeback models.
• Environment isolation – Organizations can create dedicated workgroups per environment (development, test, QA, UAT), providing complete isolation without sharing compute resources or risking cross-environment interference.
• Data mesh architecture – Domain teams can operate independently while maintaining cost-efficiency. Each domain runs its workgroup for lightweight transformations, domain-specific marts, and KPI calculations. It offers a flexible sizing option in a data mesh architecture.
• Event-driven analytics – Well-suited for short-lived or event-triggered analytics tasks. Organizations can programmatically create workgroups through APIs for A/B test analysis, campaign performance summaries, or machine learning (ML) pipeline validation.
• Low-volume one-time reporting – Organizations with infrequent or lightweight reporting needs, such as monthly financial summaries or dashboard refreshes, can use 4 RPUs to minimize costs while maintaining performance.

Cost considerations and best practices

Although the 4 RPU configuration is cost-effective, there are a few considerations to keep in mind to optimize expenses:

• Billing – Redshift Serverless bills on a per-second basis with a 60-second minimum per query. For very short queries (such as subsecond), this can inflate costs. To mitigate this, batch queries where possible to maximize resource utilization within the 60-second window. For more information, see Amazon Redshift pricing.
• Set usage limits – Use the Redshift Serverless console to set maximum RPU-hour limits (daily, weekly, or monthly) to prevent unexpected costs. You can configure alerts or automatically turn off queries when limits are reached. To learn more, see Setting usage limits, including setting RPU limits.
• Monitor with system views – Query the SYS_SERVERLESS_USAGE system table to track RPU consumption and estimate query costs. For example, you can calculate daily costs by aggregating charged seconds and multiplying by the RPU rate.
• Close transactions – Make sure transactions are explicitly closed (using COMMIT or ROLLBACK) to avoid idle sessions consuming RPUs, which can lead to unnecessary charges.

The following is a practical example for a 4 RPU workgroup in US East (N. Virginia) at $0.375/RPU-hour for a scenario of a 10-minute query running daily: This is compute costs only. Primary storage capacity is billed as Redshift Managed Storage (RMS).

• Workload duration: 10 minutes (600 seconds)
• Cost: (600 seconds / 3600 seconds) × 4 RPUs × $0.375 = $0.25
• Monthly cost (30 days): $0.25 × 30 = $7.50

Performance considerations

Although the 4 RPU configuration is cost-efficient, it’s designed for lighter workloads. For complex queries or datasets exceeding 32 TB, you must set up 8 RPUs to 24 RPUs to support up to 128 TB of storage. For more than 128 TB, you need 32 RPUs or more. If query performance is a priority, consider increasing the base capacity or enabling AI-driven scaling and optimization to optimize resources dynamically. Benchmark tests suggest that higher RPUs (such as 32 RPUs) significantly improve performance for complex queries. However, for simpler tasks, 4 RPUs deliver adequate throughput.

To monitor performance, use the Redshift Serverless console or CloudWatch metrics like ComputeCapacity and ComputeSeconds. The SYS_QUERY_HISTORY table can also help analyze query runtimes and identify bottlenecks.

Conclusion

Redshift Serverless with 4 RPU represents a significant step forward in making enterprise-grade analytics cheaper and accessible to organizations of different sizes, such as a startup building its first analytics system, a development team looking to optimize testing environments, or an enterprise implementing a data mesh architecture. This new configuration combines the power and flexibility of Redshift Serverless with a cost-effective entry point, so teams can start small and scale seamlessly as their needs grow. The ability to begin with minimal commitment while maintaining access to advanced features like automatic scaling, built-in security, and seamless data lake integration makes this a compelling option for modern data analytics workloads. Combined with pay-per-second billing and intelligent resource management, Redshift Serverless with 4 RPU delivers the ideal balance of cost-efficiency and performance.

To get started with cost-effective analytics, visit the AWS Management Console to create your Redshift Serverless workgroup with 4 RPUs. For more information, refer to the Amazon Redshift Serverless Management Guide or Amazon Redshift best practices. Plan your analytics budget effectively using the AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate costs based on your specific workload patterns, or contact your AWS account team to discuss your particular use case.

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