Connecting to Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse solution that makes it simple and cost-effective to efficiently analyze all of your data using your existing business intelligence tools

If you want to give Redshift a go, you're in luck. They have a free-trial that is live for upto two months.

Step 1: Create Redshift credentials

Step 1a: Launch Cluster

Navigate to the Redshift resource page and click on the "Launch Cluster" button:

Step 1b: Enter details

Field	Description
Cluster Identifier	You may call your cluster whatever you'd like. This is used as a simple way to identify the cluster within the AWS interface
Database Name	If you don't enter in a name for your database, it will default to "dev." This is easily found later in the AWS interface.
Database Port	Leave this number as the default value provided. In this case, it's 5439. This is easily found later in the AWS interface.
Master User Name	Enter a name in this field to create your Master User. This is easily found later in the AWS interface.
Master User Password	Enter a value in this field to create a password for your Master User.

Step 1c: Configure your Redshift node

Node Type: "DC" and "DS" stand for "Dense Compute" and "Dense Storage" respectively. The numbers that follow correspond to amount of memory and storage Available. You'll want "DC," as "DS" is only necessary if you anticipate scaling to over a petabyte (1M GB) of data.
- "DC1.Large" will allow for 15 GiB and 160 GB SSD per node, which is more than sufficient to get set up initially. If necessary, you can always easily resize your cluster retroactively.
- For details on pricing of nodes, visit this pricing page.
Cluster Type: Single node is sufficient for most users. Multi-node configurations may be necessary later on if you have many end-users querying your Redshift data warehouse at once. This can also be changed retroactively.

Step 1d: Additional configuration

On this screen you can set additional configuration options:

Configuration	Explanation
Encrypt Database	This option is entirely up to your organization's compliance standards, and it has no bearing on Silota's integration process. You may check either KMS or HSM, and the Redshift configuration will provide further instructions.
Choose a VPC	A default VPC is provided, though you may choose whichever you like if your organization already has additional VPCs configured.
Cluster Subnet Group	Leave this as default or choose another option if you'd like.
Publicly Accessible	Set this to "Yes". Silota needs to be able to connect to your Redshift cluster in order to execute queries on it.
Choose a Public IP Address	You may leave this as "no" unless you already have an IP address configured. This option will not appear if you did not make your cluster publicly accessible.
Availability Zone	This is entirely up to an organization's preference.
VPC Security Groups	You may associate your cluster with any security group you'd like.
Create a CloudWatch Alarm	If you'd like, you may create an alarm to notify you if and when you need to resize your cluster.
Creation of IAM Roles	This is not necessary at this time.

Step 1e: Review

On the final screen, you can review you configuration options before heading over to creating your cluster. You now just have to wait – it can take anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes.