Alibaba Cloud MaxCompute vs Amazon Redshift

Alibaba Cloud MaxCompute is a web-accessible, cloud-deployed data platform with separate storage and compute. It supports data lakes, streaming ingestion, and in-database machine learning. Standard computing resources cost $22 a month on subscription, with a minimum purchase of 50 CUs. Multi-zone HA computing resources cost $28.60 a month on subscription and provide high-availability compute across multiple availability zones. For elastic capacity, Elastically reserved CUs are listed at $0.05 a month, billed hourly, with scheduled scaling and pay-as-you-go billing. Auto-elastic CUs are listed at $0.06 a month, billed hourly, with usage monitored per second, automatic scaling, and charges based on resources consumed. The pricing model is paid, with a starting pricing note of $0.05. These options separate fixed subscription capacity from elastic resource usage, while the platform’s storage and compute separation supports data workloads that need independently provisioned resources.

Amazon Redshift is a cloud data warehouse for SQL analytics across data warehouses and data lakes. It offers provisioned and serverless deployments, with options AWS says can scale to petabytes and support thousands of concurrent users. Redshift runs read-only SQL queries on Apache Iceberg, Apache Hudi, and Delta Lake tables, plus open file formats in Amazon S3. Zero-ETL integrations connect with Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, and enterprise applications. Streaming ingestion connects with Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka. Listed integrations include QuickSight, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Alteryx, Jupyter Notebook, Informatica, dbt, MicroStrategy, and Looker. The Data API supports AWS SDK languages including Python, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, and C++. Security includes encryption, row- and column-level controls, and dynamic masking. It is paid, has no free plan, offers a free trial, and starts at $0.54 per month for Provisioned or $1.50 per month for Serverless.