AWS announced yesterday that they are rolling out a newer generation DS2 Amazon Redshift that has 50% better performance compared to what they previously offered, at the exact same price. The newly released DS2 instances have roughly twice the CPU and memory, as well as support for enhanced networking, which will allow queries to run even faster than before. Most notably, the DS2 instances are offered at exactly the same price as the previous generation DS1 instances (previously named “DW1”). This makes switching to DS2 a no-brainer, as long as you can do a one-time migration from your DW1. In addition, the Amazon Redshift team announced new pricing options for purchasing reserved instances. Now you have the choice of purchasing reserved instances with no upfront cost. Although there is less discount when paying no upfront cost, this could be a very attractive option for many startups. We’ll be posting some future articles as we learn more about DS2, so stay tuned! In the meantime, you can read more about the announcement here:https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-redshift-now-faster-and-more-cost-effective-than-ever/