Cloudwards Guide: What Is Amazon QuickSight?

Amazon has recently introduced QuickSight, a cloud based business intelligence tool with the main aim of simplifying the entire process of developing insights from heaps of big data sources easily, quickly and of course at a low cost.

Amazon claims the tool is very a fast, easy-to-use, cloud-powered business intelligence for 1/10th the cost of traditional BI solutions.

Helping Out Amazon Web Services

There is no denying that over the last few years Amazon Web Service has created a strong ground for itself by providing an array of services to collect, store and process huge amount of data.

You would be surprised to know the list of companies who rely on Amazon Web Services today. From large established companies like Philips and Samsung to technology backed companies like Adobe and Netflix, they all prefer Amazon Web services for their big data needs.

Even startups like FourSquare and AirBnB rely on AWS.

To understand how QuickSight can actually help AWS, let’s dig a little deeper in it. Once the data generated from customer applications goes into the AWS infrastructure, it is streamed through Amazon Kinesis and stored in a relational data source like:

• Amazon Redshift
• Amazon Aurora
• Amazon RDS

The data sources could also be file based like Amazon S3 or NoSQL data sources like Amazon DynamoDB. After data is secured, it is sent for analysis. For analysing and processing data, there are tools like AWS Data Pipeline and AWS Machine Learning.

There is a big gap on how the data is collected and processed and how the business users make every day key decisions through the analysis of that data.

I have worked on a few Business Intelligence tools myself back when I was working in the IT industry, and I can tell you the entire process from collecting data to finally creating reports is way too long than anyone would want it to be.

Generally, Business intelligence solutions need several teams of engineers to spend months on understanding and building complex data models. The data sources are combined and tested over and over again to make sure there is no bug in between.

And only after clearing the final QA round, it is passed on to the next team that uses a completely different software to generate reports.

This is the report shown to the key decision makers of the company instead of the actual data sources. These solutions limit business users to pre-selected queries and reports because there is no room for visual capabilities or interactive data exploration.

To top that of, organizations have to spend thousands of dollars every year on licenses, maintenance fees and heavy hardware. To support these Business Intelligence tools. And if organizations want to increase their number of employees or data volume, they obviously have to shell out more money to keep things going.

QuickSight – The Answer to All the BI Problems

Amazon QuickSight is a cloud powered business intelligence service created to solve big data problems including complexity, speed and cost.

It does this by making all the big data sources readily available to business users and giving them an easy-to-use interface at 1/10^th of the total cost of other business intelligence solutions. I strongly feel AWS has redefined the world ‘affordable’ by providing Amazon QuickSight at a cost of $9 per user, per month.

Key Components of QuickSight

1. SPICE

Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine (SPICE) is the most powerful and key component of QuickSight. It is actually built by the same team of people who brought to you Amazon RedShift and Amazon Aurora.

SPICE is the key enabler for QuickSight and it helps to scale through terabytes of data and still maintain a response time of a few milliseconds. Basically, when you point your data to QuickSight, all the data is taken in by SPICE to produce optimal query performance.

With its rich calculations, SPICE allows its users to derive insights from their data sources without any extra provision or scaling infrastructure.

The reason why SPICE is so quick to respond to queries is because it replicates data for high performance and availability. This means organizations can scale up to thousands of users who can all perform interactive and fast analysis, at the very same time and across various data sources.

2. AutoDiscovery

If you have ever used a business intelligence tool then you would know that one of the biggest challenges is to discover the data and select it for analysis.

Usually, this requires a team of data engineers to catalog and make the data discoverable with the help of an analytics engine. But with QuickSight, when you login into it, the software automatically discovers data sources that you have access to, analyses them and sets it up.

3. AutoGraph

Back when I worked with BI, one of the most frustrating problems I faced was creating graphs and visualizing how each graph should look.

And I am glad to see QuickSight has taken care of this problem. All you have to do is select the data type you are dealing with and QuickSIght will select the best graph to visualize it.

4. Sharing and Collaboration

There is a great story board feature that allows you to combine visualizations and present them in the form of business dashboards, add comments and share them with groups or individuals (in your organizations). Again, great for faster and better work.

Amazon QuickSight Pricing

This of course is one of the most compelling features of QuickSight. A standard annual subscription will cost you $9 per month, while a monthly subscription will cost $12 per month.

An enterprise annual subscription will cost $18, while monthly subscription for that will cost $24. This includes 10GB space for bundled SPICE. For every extra GB of space, you have to pay $0.25 per month for the Standard edition and $0.38 for the Enterprise edition.

Conclusion

Amazon QuickSight has definitely got us excited and we really think it can change the BI game  by offering fast performing tools at a great cost.

It is only available as a preview feature right now, but we have a feeling Amazon is going to launch it pretty soon. In case you are interested in checking out the preview, you can sign up here