Amazon took a giant step into cloud-based data warehousing with the launch of RedShift on Wednesday, and the industry will feel its impact. "What I think we're seeing here is evidence of how, when a technology becomes a cloud-based service, it leads to the commoditization of any or all related services," said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

 

Amazon Web Services on Wednesday launched RedShift, an on-demand data warehouse service that is optimized for the analysis of huge sets of data.

RedShift is "profoundly disruptive," said Merv Adrian, research vice president of information management at Gartner. Its success will move the economic boundary between on-premises and cloud usage and "data will seek its lowest-cost home more rapidly than before."

RedShift allows setup, operation and scaling of a data warehouse cluster through the Web-based AWS Console.

Amazon is inviting prospective users to sign up for a limited preview of RedShift. More than 20 customers, including Netflix and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have signed up for the preview, Amazon said.