Early last year, Amazon Web Services made Redshift available to the world. The service promised a “fast and powerful, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse in the cloud.” AWS fulfilled that promise, and it’s now making it even better.

Amazon Web Services announced this morning that Redshift customers now have access to what it calls Dense Compute nodes. These new solid state drive-based nodes “enable customers to create even faster, lower cost data warehouse with Amazon Redshift.” When AWS says Dense Compute will lower costs, they certainly mean it as 160GB datasets will only cost $0.10 an hour.

“Amazon Redshift has become the fastest-growing service in the history of AWS by providing customers with a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehousing service for a tenth the price of traditional solutions,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President of Database Services, AWS. “We have been actively engaging with our customers using Amazon Redshift and watching them tap into insights that were previously out of reach to help grow their businesses. Today, we are making Amazon Redshift even more accessible to customers, lowering the cost of a single node by as much as 56 percent while increasing the ratio of CPU, RAM, and I/O to storage to offer even higher performance.”

With this latest option, Amazon says Redshift customers can now choose between Dense Compute nodes and Dense Storage nodes with just a simple API call. For customers who need less than 500GB of data or care more about performance when going above 500GB, you’ll want to go with Dense Compute. If you care more about lowering the cost of storage, you’ll want to go with Dense Storage. It may not have the same performance as Dense Compute, but you can scale up to 1PB or more.

Before making Dense Compute nodes available to the public at large, AWS let some well known Web brands try it out. One such company was Pinterest and it only had nice things to say about it:

“At Pinterest, we analyze tens of billions of objects, including pins, boards, and places, across our web and mobile properties to understand and optimize the Pinner experience for tens of millions of people around the world. Amazon Redshift has been a huge win. It’s made big data feel small and enabled our data science team to run the queries they need across a huge, rapidly growing data set. Amazon Redshift is easy to manage and with both the Dense Storage and Dense Compute node types, we know that regardless of our cost, storage, and performance needs, Amazon Redshift is up to the challenge,” said Mohammad Shahangian, Data Scientist, Pinterest.

AWS notes that Amazon Redshift Dense Storage and Dense Compute nodes are available in the following regions: US East, US West, EU, Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). You can learn more about it here.

Image via Amazon Web Services/YouTube