Redshift Serverless is not serverless. A workgroup is a normal, ordinary Redshift cluster. All workgroups are initially created as a 16 node cluster with 8 slices per node, which is the default 128 RPU workgroup, and then elastic resized to the size specified by the user. This is why the original RPU range is 32 to 512 in units of 8 and the default is 128 RPU; the default is the mid-point of a 4x elastic resize range, and a single node, the smallest possible change in cluster size, is 8 RPU/slices. 1 RPU is 1 slice. With elastic rather than classic resize, the greater the change in either direction from the size of the original cluster, the more inefficiency is introduced into the cluster. As a cluster becomes increasingly larger, it becomes increasingly computationally inefficient (the largest workgroup has 128 normal data slices, but 384 of the lesser compute slices), and increasingly under-utilizes disk parallelism. As a cluster becomes increasingly smaller, it becomes increasingly computationally inefficient (each data slice must process multiple slices' worth of data), and incurs increasingly more disk use overhead with tables. The more recently introduced smaller workgroups, 8 to 24 RPU (inclusive both ends) use a 4 slice node and have two nodes for every 8 RPU. In this case, the 8 RPU workgroup is initially a 16 node cluster with 8 slices per node, which is resized to a 2 node cluster with 4 slices per node - a staggering 16x elastic resize; the largest resize permitted to normal users is 4x; an 8 RPU workgroup, with small tables, uses 256mb per column rather than the 16mb per column of a native two node cluster. Workgroups have a fixed number of RPU and require a resize to change this; workgroups do not dynamically auto-scale RPUs. I was unable to prove it, because AutoWLM is in the way, but I am categorically of the view that the claims made for Serverless for dynamic auto-scaling are made on the basis of the well-known and long-established mechanisms of AutoWLM and Concurrency Scaling Clusters ("CSC"). Finally, it is possible to confidently extrapolate from the `ra3.4xlarge` and `ra3.16xlarge` node types a price as they would be in a provisioned cluster for the 8 slice node type, of 6.52 USD per hour. Both Provisioned and Serverless clusters charge per node-second, but Serverless goes to zero cost with zero use. With the default Serverless workgroup of 128 RPU/16 nodes (avoiding the need to account for the inefficiencies introduced by elastic resize), one hour of constant use (avoiding the need to account for the Serverless minimum query charge of 60 seconds of run-time), without CSC (avoiding the question of how AutoWLM will behave), costs 46.08 USD. A Provisioned cluster composed of the same nodes costs 104.32 USD; about twice as much. Here we have to take into consideration the inefficiencies introduced by elastic resize, which become more severe the more the cluster deviates from 16 NRPU, that Serverless uses AutoWLM, with all its drawbacks, and which is a black box controlling the use of CSC, with each CSC being billed at the price of the workgroup, and the 60 second minimum charge. All Serverless costs (including the charge for Redshift Spectrum S3 access) have been rolled into a single AWS charge for Serverless, so it is not possible to know what is costing money. It would have been much better if AWS had simply introduced zero-zero billing on Provisioned clusters. This would avoid many of the weaknesses and drawbacks of Serverless Redshift, which wholly unnecessarily devalue the Serverless product, as well as avoiding the duplicity, considerable added complexity, end-user confusion, cost in developer time and induced cluster inefficiency involved in the pretence that Serverless is serverless.

https://www.redshiftresearchproject.org/white_papers/downloa...

https://www.redshiftresearchproject.org/white_papers/downloa...