User guide

Tutorial: Resizing Clusters in
Amazon Redshift
Topics
• Overview (p. 224)
• Resize Operation Overview (p. 224)
• Snapshot, Restore, and Resize Operation Overview (p. 225)
• Tutorial: Using the Resize Operation to Resize a Cluster (p. 226)
• Tutorial: Using the Snapshot, Restore, and Resize Operations to Resize a Cluster (p. 228)
Overview
As your data warehousing capacity and performance needs change or grow, you can resize your cluster
to make the best use of the computing and storage options that Amazon Redshift provides.You can scale
the cluster in or out by changing the number of nodes. Or, you can scale the cluster up or down by
specifying a different node type.You can resize your cluster by using one of the following approaches:
• Use the resize operation with an existing cluster.
• Use the snapshot and restore operations to make a copy of an existing cluster. Then, resize the new
cluster.
Both the resize approach and the snapshot and restore approach copy user tables and data to the new
cluster; they do not do anything with system tables and data. If you have enabled audit logging in your
source cluster, you’ll be able to continue to access the logs in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon
S3) even after you delete the source cluster.You can keep or delete these logs as your data policies
specify.
Resize Operation Overview
The resize operation is the preferred method to resize your cluster because it is the simplest method.
With the resize operation, your data is copied in parallel from the compute node or nodes in your source
cluster to the compute node or nodes in the target cluster. The time that it takes to resize depends on
API Version 2012-12-01
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Amazon Redshift Management Guide
Overview