Amazon Redshift Serverless
Redshift without managing clusters
The serverless version of Redshift: automatically provisions and scales compute capacity (RPUs) when queries run, with no nodes to choose or clusters to manage.
- Cost$$ Medium
- Difficulty●●●●●
- Costs money when idle?A little
- Serverless
- In examsSAA
Think of it asLike taking a taxi instead of buying a car: you pay only when you need a ride.
When to use it
✓ Use it when
Irregular, uneven analytics workloads, or when you want to get started quickly.
✗ Avoid it when
Heavy queries running steadily 24/7 → Redshift provisioned (often cheaper with Reserved).
Common uses
- Ad-hoc analysis for small teams
- Reports that run a few times a day
- Dev/test data warehouse environments
What does it cost?
- Pricing model: Charged per RPU-hour while queries run (billed per second) plus GB of storage.
⚠️ Cost traps
Dashboards that auto-refresh constantly keep compute running all the time — set a maximum RPU limit.
Related services
SAA-C03 study guide
Redshift Serverless is covered in these study modules: