10 min
Amazon Redshift Serverless vs Provisioned: Which Is Right for Your Workload?
Serverless RPUs vs Provisioned RA3 — still not automatic. July 2026 refresh: base 4–1024 RPUs, Max RPU-hours, AI-driven scaling, when RI wins.
Palaniappan PBlog category
Data & Analytics
- Articles in this topic
- 30
Palaniappan P
14 min
Amazon OpenSearch Service: Architecture Patterns and Cost Optimization
Amazon OpenSearch Service powers search, log analytics, and time-series workloads on AWS. Here are the architecture patterns and cost levers that matter most in production.
Palaniappan P
12 min
Real-Time Data Pipelines on AWS: Kinesis Data Streams + Lambda + DynamoDB
Kinesis Data Streams combined with Lambda and DynamoDB is the simplest path to a real-time data pipeline on AWS. Here is the complete architecture, code patterns, and operational guidance.
Palaniappan P
10 min
AWS EMR: Serverless vs EC2 vs EKS — When to Use Each
EMR Serverless vs EC2 vs EKS for Spark. July 2026 refresh — Spot limits, cold start, Iceberg on all three, and a decision matrix for intermittent vs 24/7 jobs.
Palaniappan P
13 min
AWS Glue 5: Modern ETL with Apache Iceberg — Tables, Time Travel, and Lakehouse Patterns
Glue 5.1 (Spark 3.5.6, Iceberg 1.10.0) for lakehouse ETL. July 2026 refresh — Iceberg v2 vs v3, Lake Formation writes, compaction, Athena compatibility.
Palaniappan P
12 min
AWS Glue vs dbt on AWS: Data Transformation Decision Guide for 2026
Glue does EL; dbt does T. July 2026 refresh — Glue 5.1 DPU economics, dbt-athena/Redshift, and the combined stack most teams converge on.
Palaniappan P
12 min
Amazon Athena Cost Optimization: Partition Pruning, Compression, and Iceberg Tables
Athena still bills ~$5/TB scanned (or Capacity Reservations by DPU). July 2026 refresh — partitions, Parquet/Iceberg, workgroups, and when provisioned capacity wins.
Palaniappan P
11 min
Amazon QuickSight Embedding: Adding Analytics to Your SaaS Application
Embedding QuickSight dashboards in your SaaS product gives every customer analytics without building a BI layer from scratch. Here is the complete implementation guide — embedding types, authentication, row-level security, and cost.
Palaniappan P
11 min
Real-Time Stream Processing with Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink
Managed Flink for stateful streaming. July 2026 refresh — KDA name EOL, KPU + orchestration KPU, per-second billing, Flink vs Lambda decision matrix.
Palaniappan P
6 min
How to Build a Serverless Data Pipeline with AWS Glue and Athena
Glue ETL + Athena SQL without servers — still the default lake path. July 2026: Glue 5.x jobs, Parquet partitions, ~$0.44/DPU-hour + $5/TB scan math, pipeline checklist.
Palaniappan P
16 min
How to Run High-Scale Postgres on AWS Without Breaking the Bank
RDS, Aurora, and self-managed Postgres each have a cost breakeven point. This guide covers total cost of ownership, connection pooling with PgBouncer, indexing strategies, and the edge cases that turn Postgres into a billing surprise.
Palaniappan P
16 min
How to Design MongoDB for Scalable, Cost-Efficient Workloads on AWS
Atlas vs EC2 vs DocumentDB on AWS — TCO flips with DBA time, not $/vCPU. July 2026: index/cache pressure, hot shards, DocumentDB API-compat caveat.
Palaniappan P