Why Is Everyone Suddenly Talking About Amazon Redshift?

It seems like all I hear these days is Redshift, Redshift, Redshift!

I met up with a recruiter today. We talked about this & that. The usual. Then when he came to the topic of technology he said,

“Yeah, it seems as though suddenly everybody is looking for Redshift & Snowflake”

As I blogged about before, I don’t work with recruiters, I learn a lot from them.

What Does Recruiters of Amazon Redshift Want?

Luckily, I got to cut my teeth on Redshift about a year ago. I was a senior database engineer managing Amazon & MySQL RDS, and they wanted to build a data warehouse. Bingo!

Here’s the big takeaway from my discussion today. Recruiters have their fingers on the pulse!

1. We Need an Amazon Expert

Here’s what else I’m hearing everywhere. “We’re migrating to AWS, can you help?” Complexity & confusion around the new virtual networking, moving into the cloud, and tuning applications & components to get the same performance as before. All of these are real & present needs for firms.

Related: Is data your dirty little secret?

2. We Need a Redshift Expert

Amazon bought Par Accel, a bleedingly fast warehouse. It uses SQL. It looks like Postgres and handles petabytes. You read that petabyte! It’s so good in fact that it seems a lot of folks are now dumping Hadoop.

Incredible as that sounds, Redshift is delivering *that* kind of speed on that kind of big data. Wow! What’s more, you skip the whole Hadoop cycle of writing, testing, debugging, scheduling jobs, fixing bugs, and stirring. With SQL you bring back the iterative agile process!

Read: 5 cloud challenges I’m thinking about today

3. We Need a Hadoop Expert

Ok, for those enterprises who aren’t sold on Redshift yet, there is still a ton of Hadoop out there. And for good reason.

Apache Spark is also getting really big now too. It’s easier to manage the successor to Hadoop, based around much of the same concepts.

Also: 5 core pieces of the Amazon cloud puzzle to get your project off the ground

4. We Need Strong Python Skills

Python is everywhere. Amazon’s command line interface is Python based. You see it everywhere. If it’s not in your wheelhouse get it there!

Also: Why Dropbox didn’t have to fail

5. We Need Communicators

Another interesting thing the recruiter said

“I was surprised & a little shocked that you suggested we meet for coffee. Most developers are hard to get out to have a conversation with.”

Good communicators are as in-demand as ever! Being able to and happy to talk with people who aren’t deeply technical, and distill complex technical jargon into plain English. And do that with a smile too & enjoy it?

That’s special!

Conclusion

Hopefully all the mysteries about Amazon Redshift are cleared by now and now you know what you’ll need about Amazon Redshift after reading this. If you still have any questions regarding this, don’t hesitate to ask in our comment box below. Thanks for reading!