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Amazon QuickSight Now Generally Available

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Re: Amazon QuickSight Now Generally Available

#32

Post by retr0grad3 »

I was involved in the alpha for QiuckSight and found it interesting. My feeling is that Amazon realizes that there is a market for data visualization and analysis for RDS, Redshift, S3 flat files, etc. There are many players in this space as well as traditional BI companies like Tableau.

QuickSight is going to be leveraged for more than just data analysis. They'll (probably) be using this for cost exploring and other features down the road (ELB Log Analysis, VPC Flow Log Analysis).

There are several limitations that I ran into. If you want to use a Redshift cluster as a data source it has to be a) publicly accesable and b) you have to whitelist the QuickSight IP range. QuickSight is launched in Amazon's infrastructure (their account and VPC) and that places limitations on what can be accessed (no VPC peering).

As an operations engineer, my biggest feedback was "let me launch my own QuickSight resources in my own VPC". Don't get me wrong, the fact that you get an AD instance, SPICE DB, and Web UI at a button click is nice, but I want to have more freedom to control and secure it. Just my two cents.

Re: Amazon QuickSight Now Generally Available

#33

Post by empath75 »

mangeletti wrote: post #26

Amazon will likely begin competing with many of their AWS customers. Step 1: develop a Trojan horse to gather growth and profitability data (QuickSight). Step 2: roll out home-grown apps to compete with their most profitable AWS customers. This is exactly how Amazon.com operates[1]. I can only imagine how the conversation went: Bob: We need to diversify! Earl: You're right! Let's do some research. Susan: That'll cost…

Yeah, it seems like if you are building a business on AWS, they are either going to buy you (Twitch) or compete with you (Netflix), and I don't see how you beat them when they're taking x% of your profits off the top.

Re: Amazon QuickSight Now Generally Available

#34

Post by apathy »

empath75 wrote: post #33
mangeletti wrote: post #26

Amazon will likely begin competing with many of their AWS customers. Step 1: develop a Trojan horse to gather growth and profitability data (QuickSight). Step 2: roll out home-grown apps to compete with their most profitable AWS customers. This is exactly how Amazon.com operates[1]. I can only imagine how the conversation went: Bob: We need to diversify! Earl: You're right! Let's do some research. Susan: That'll cost…

Yeah, it seems like if you are building a business on AWS, they are either going to buy you (Twitch) or compete with you (Netflix), and I don't see how you beat them when they're taking x% of your profits off the top.

I'm starting to appreciate that Trump may not be all bad. If he actually brings antitrust suits against Amazon for this sort of malarkey, and gets rid of the EC, and adds term limits, maybe the country will take longer to turn into Putin's Russia.

On the other hand maybe Amazon will just turn into Gazprom and the voting will become irrelevant. I'm not opposed to California seceding, just trying to envision what bad things might have been more likely had Trump not been elected.

Sort of a "well, that chlorine gas attack sure cut down on the traffic in Aleppo!" type of thing... :-/

Re: Amazon QuickSight Now Generally Available

#37

Post by apeace »

Just want to chime in what a big deal their (very low) pricing is, at least to me.

As a software engineer, I have been in a tricky situation a couple times when my boss asked me to build out data visualization features in our internal admin dashboards--including generic visualization of arbitrary data in our SQL database.

Of course, the correct answer is, "We have better things to use our time on, we should buy something for this". But the boss is never happy to hear that:

* These services start at around $1000/month, even for very small-scale data.

* There are additional charges per-user.

* There are additional charges (hundreds per month) for more data sources (e.g. if you have a second SQL database, or dump some data to Redshift)

What's more, it is next to impossible to find pricing information on these service's web sites. Instead you resort to Quora[0] and hope the information is accurate.

I have used both Periscope and Looker, and loved them. But according to the Quicksight pricing page[1], my company could get everything it needs from Quicksight for under $50/month.

After I hit submit I am planning to run to my boss and tell him I finally found the one. (Of course, we'll see how the demo goes first ;)

[0] https://www.quora.com/Can-anyone-share-their-experience-and-...

[1] https://quicksight.aws/pricing/

Re: Amazon QuickSight Now Generally Available

#39

Post by Diederich »

This (and your comments) seem very interesting, but after reading through the glossy web pages, I honestly can't quite get a bead on what this really does. As for background, I've been deeply technical, on the back end/server side since the beginning.

It says I can upload a CSV. What would be in the CSV? One row per sale, for instance? Does it then do a bunch of magic to, among other things, trend that pile of data?

Thanks in advance!

Re: Amazon QuickSight Now Generally Available

#40

Post by thefalcon »

apeace wrote: post #37

Just want to chime in what a big deal their (very low) pricing is, at least to me. As a software engineer, I have been in a tricky situation a couple times when my boss asked me to build out data visualization features in our internal admin dashboards--including generic visualization of arbitrary data in our SQL database. Of course, the correct answer is, "We have better things to use our time on, we should buy somet…

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