Redshift had architectural issues from Day 1. Too many knobs to turn, and it's just not something customers wanted to do. I know, because we built a whole company around selling Redshift performance tuning.
Everything that's been added in terms of functionality is just window dressing in IMHO. BigQuery and in particular Snowflake have a superior architecture, with the separation of storage and compute.
Also, someone mentions in on the thread, the Redshift marketing was horrible.
Features, features, features, features, etc.
Compare that to Snowflake, and how their message evolved:
"The Cloud Warehouse"
"Data Cloud"
So much more compelling. Also, Snowflake had a killer sales and marketing team.
Many other, little things. The Redshift team was constrained by what the AWS Console would give them. Snowflake could build more, better admin features. Redshift tried to mitigate that by acquiring a client (Datarow), but from what I heard, the acquisition never got integrated.
Having said that, set-up and configured the right way, Redshift was faster and cheaper than any other data warehouse on the market. Except - nobody wanted to spend the time on properly configuring their cluster. People just wanted their warehouse to work, and that's what BigQuery and Snowflake delivered. Even when that meant paying more.
The time you spent tuning Redshift for performance, you spent on tuning Snowflake and BigQuery for cost. Pick your poison. But again, people didn't care about the money - they just wanted things to work.
I didn't really see BigQuery as competition, simply because that meant switching clouds.
What I did hear is that analytics teams preferred GCP overall, and I think that has driven a lot of cloud workloads from AWS and GCP, because in the last few years analytics teams started to be decision market in many companies.
IMHO, GCP has the much better analytics portfolio than AWS. By now, also the better sales team. It's been really smart by GCP to bet on data science and analytics because of data gravity. Once you have the data in your cloud, it attracts workloads.
Snowflake is what eventually killed our performance tuning business. You can find my post-mortem on our company on Medium.
As you can probably tell, I know more about the whole analytics ecosystem than I bargained for.
Everything that's been added in terms of functionality is just window dressing in IMHO. BigQuery and in particular Snowflake have a superior architecture, with the separation of storage and compute.
Also, someone mentions in on the thread, the Redshift marketing was horrible.
Features, features, features, features, etc.
Compare that to Snowflake, and how their message evolved:
"The Cloud Warehouse" "Data Cloud"
So much more compelling. Also, Snowflake had a killer sales and marketing team.
Many other, little things. The Redshift team was constrained by what the AWS Console would give them. Snowflake could build more, better admin features. Redshift tried to mitigate that by acquiring a client (Datarow), but from what I heard, the acquisition never got integrated.
Having said that, set-up and configured the right way, Redshift was faster and cheaper than any other data warehouse on the market. Except - nobody wanted to spend the time on properly configuring their cluster. People just wanted their warehouse to work, and that's what BigQuery and Snowflake delivered. Even when that meant paying more.
The time you spent tuning Redshift for performance, you spent on tuning Snowflake and BigQuery for cost. Pick your poison. But again, people didn't care about the money - they just wanted things to work.
I didn't really see BigQuery as competition, simply because that meant switching clouds.
What I did hear is that analytics teams preferred GCP overall, and I think that has driven a lot of cloud workloads from AWS and GCP, because in the last few years analytics teams started to be decision market in many companies.
IMHO, GCP has the much better analytics portfolio than AWS. By now, also the better sales team. It's been really smart by GCP to bet on data science and analytics because of data gravity. Once you have the data in your cloud, it attracts workloads.
Snowflake is what eventually killed our performance tuning business. You can find my post-mortem on our company on Medium.
As you can probably tell, I know more about the whole analytics ecosystem than I bargained for.