Data & Analytics

Serverless RPUs vs Provisioned RA3 — still not automatic. July 2026 refresh: base 4–1024 RPUs, Max RPU-hours, AI-driven scaling, when RI wins.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Athena still bills ~$5/TB scanned (or Capacity Reservations by DPU). July 2026 refresh — partitions, Parquet/Iceberg, workgroups, and when provisioned capacity wins.

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.

Managed Flink for stateful streaming. July 2026 refresh — KDA name EOL, KPU + orchestration KPU, per-second billing, Flink vs Lambda decision matrix.

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.

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.

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.