User guide

For more information about Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), go to the Amazon VPC product
detail page.
Choose a Platform
Your AWS account is capable of launching instances either into both platforms, or only into EC2-VPC,
on a region-by-region basis. To determine which platform your account supports, and then launch a
cluster, do the following:
1. Decide on the AWS region in which you want to deploy a cluster. For a list of AWS regions in which
Amazon Redshift is available, go to Regions and Endpoints in the Amazon Web Services General
Reference.
2. Find out which Amazon EC2 platforms your account supports in the chosen AWS region.You can find
this information in the Amazon EC2 console. For step-by-step instructions, go to Supported Platforms
in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances.
3. If your account supports both of the platforms, choose the one on which you want to deploy your
Amazon Redshift cluster. If your account supports only EC2-VPC, you must deploy your cluster in
VPC.
4. Deploy your Amazon Redshift cluster.You can deploy a cluster by using the Amazon Redshift console,
or programmatically by using the Amazon Redshift API, CLI, or SDK libraries. For more information
about these options and links to the related documentation, see What Is Amazon Redshift? (p. 1).
Regions and Availability Zone Considerations
Amazon Redshift is available in several AWS regions. By default, Amazon Redshift provisions your cluster
in a randomly selected Availability Zone (AZ) within the AWS region that you select. All the cluster nodes
are provisioned in the same AZ.
You can optionally request a specific AZ if Amazon Redshift is available in that AZ. For example, if you
already have an Amazon EC2 instance running in one AZ, you might want to create your Amazon Redshift
cluster in the same AZ to reduce latency. On the other hand, you might want to choose another AZ for
higher availability. Amazon Redshift might not be available in all AZs within a region.
For a list of supported AWS regions where you can provision an Amazon Redshift cluster, go to Regions
and Endpoints in the Amazon Web Services General Reference.
Maintenance Windows
Amazon Redshift periodically performs maintenance to apply upgrades to your cluster. During these
updates, your Amazon Redshift cluster is not available for normal operations.
Amazon Redshift assigns a 30 minute maintenance window at random from an 8-hour block of time per
region, occurring on a random day of the week (Monday through Sunday, inclusive).The following list
shows the time blocks for each region from which the default maintenance windows are assigned:
• US East (N. Virginia) region: 03:00-11:00 UTC
• US West (Oregon) region: 06:00-14:00 UTC
• EU (Frankfurt) region: 06:00-14:00 UTC
• Asia Pacific (Sydney) region: 12:00-20:00 UTC
• Asia Pacific (Singapore) region: 14:00-22:00 UTC
• Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region: 17:00-03:00 UTC
API Version 2012-12-01
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Amazon Redshift Management Guide
Choose a Platform