Hello, Cloud Gurus and welcome to AWS Service Spotlight. In this series,
we put the spotlight on specific AWS services,
walking through detailed technical demos to explore their features, benefits,
and costs. I'm Brock Tubre,
and today we are going to talk about Amazon QuickSight.
Making analytical decisions from data is an important and integral step to
ensure the growth of businesses.
And most of an organization's data is spread across multiple data sources,
including databases, data lakes, and data warehouses.
So making analytical decisions from all of this data in an easy
to understand, interactive and visual way, now that can be difficult to do.
Amazon QuickSight is a fully managed business intelligence, or BI,
tool that allows you to connect your data in the cloud and
combines data from many different sources. With QuickSight,
you can include AWS data, third party data, big data,
spreadsheet data, SaaS data, B2B data, and more.
If you've got data,
then QuickSight will help you build dashboards and make your data look pretty
quick.
QuickSight was originally announced at re:Invent 2015 and its claim
to fame is to provide a faster,
more cost-effective and easy to use business intelligence tool compared to
other tools in the market.
Now I've been bitten by the data analytics bug and wanted to share this service.
In this episode of AWS Service Spotlight. During this episode,
I'll give you a rundown of Amazon QuickSight by going through an overview of the
service. We'll take a look at its features and its cost.
I'll run through a demo showing you how QuickSight works before diving into
the final verdict. So if you're ready, then let's get started.
Amazon QuickSight is a fully managed cloud-scale business intelligence service
that allows you to create visualizations and dashboards for the people you work
with, wherever they are.
QuickSight allows you to connect your data from many different data sources.
It also provides user management tools to scale from just a few users
to tens of thousands of users,
all of this with no infrastructure to deploy and manage yourself.
QuickSight's claim to fame is to provide a fast,
cost-effective and easy to use BI tool. So the question is, well,
how does QuickSight accomplish this? Well,
QuickSight uses an in-memory engine called SPICE,
which stands for super fast parallel in-memory calculation engine,
which is just a fancy way of saying that the data that makes up the
visualizations is stored in-memory,
so it's faster and easier to retrieve than having to query the original data
source
each time it's engineered to rapidly perform advanced calculations and serve the
data. QuickSight is cost-effective,
offering cheaper pricing per user compared to other business intelligence tools.
And finally QuickSight offers an easy to use interface where users can easily
connect their data, create analysis and visualizations,
and then publish those results to dashboard,
to be viewed by users or embed those dashboards into other websites and
other apps. Depending on your business needs,
QuickSight offers two separate editions,
each with their own set of features and costs.
QuickSight standard edition and QuickSight enterprise edition.
Just like most software upgrade models,
the enterprise edition has all the features that the standard edition has,
plus more.
The standard edition is ideal for personal data analysis and exploration,
and the enterprise edition is built for large scale BI deployments.
Understanding your business needs will help you determine which edition you'll
want to use. For example,
if you want to embed your dashboards into a website or authenticate your
QuickSight users using active directory, you'll need the enterprise edition,
but if you just want to create on the fly analysis and visualizations of
spreadsheets or CSV data, then the standard edition might be right for you.
Whichever you choose, you can always start a 60-day free trial.
You can also upgrade from standard to enterprise edition at any time,
where all of your authentication details and user data will be seamlessly
migrated to the enterprise.
Edition. Now let's talk about the cost.
Contrary to the name QuickSight,
you may need to take a slow look over the pricing of QuickSight to determine
how and what you'll be charged for.
When you first get started with QuickSight you'll need to select a standard
edition or an enterprise edition.
Let's first talk about the cost of the standard edition.
When you first get started,
you'll be set up with one free user with one gigabyte of SPICE capacity.
After that,
the pricing of users will be $9 per user per month with an annual subscription.
If you decide to pay month to month,
the price is going to be $12 per user per month.
You also pay for the SPICE capacity.
Luckily AWS gifts each user 10 gigabytes of SPICE capacity upfront
for free. However,
an additional capacity cost is 25 cents per gigabyte for any additional
capacity. Now let's talk about the cost of enterprise edition.
Similar to the standard edition,
you'll be set up with one for user with one gigabyte of SPICE capacity.
After that the pricing of the enterprise edition of.
QuickSight is a bit more complicated and is broken.
Down into two categories of users, readers and authors.
A QuickSight reader is a reader who consumes interactive dashboards.
Readers can log in and view shared dashboards. They can filter data,
drill down to details or export the data as a CSV file using a web
browser or a mobile app. Authors, on the other hand,
have the ability to set up data imports,
create and publish interactive dashboards, set up email reports,
as well as manage users, and more.
If your QuickSight account requires reader access, you'll have two options.
Option one is good if your user base is predictable.
The cost is 30 cents per session,
where one session is 30 minutes and starts when a reader logs in and
starts to interact with the dashboard.
You only pay for the time the reader is logged in and is interacting with the
dashboard. The most you will pay per user is $5 per month.
This is when the reader reaches or exceeds 17 sessions.
So the less usage frequency equates to cheaper costs and the most you'll pay
per user is $5 per month.
Now option two is based on session capacity and a good choice if the amount of
users is less predictable.
The cost starts at $250 per month for the first 500 sessions per
month. Again, a session is just 30 minutes from when a user logs in.
Any sessions over 500 sessions per month is charged 50 cents per
overage session. There are also cheaper options for annual commitments.
Every QuickSight account has authors and the pricing for authors are on a per
user basis. The cost starts at $18 per user,
per month with an annual subscription.
And the price increases to $24 per user per month.
If you decide to pay month to month,
each user is given free 10 gigabytes of SPICE capacity and it costs
38 cents per gigabyte for additional SPICE capacity.
Like most AWS services,
pricing can be complicated and QuickSight pricing is no different. Luckily,
both additions provide a 60 day free trial where you can set up readers and
author users for your team and organization. After that,
you can start to monitor and understand the total usage.
This will help you build out a pricing per month model that you'll be charged.
The benefits of using QuickSight is blazing fast responses when the data is
retrieved to build dashboards.
You can easily combine a variety of data from a variety of sources into
a single analysis.
You can then publish the analysis in dashboards and easily control features
available in those dashboards. For the enterprise edition,
you can take advantage of automated and customizable data insights that are
powered by machine learning. This means you can take advantage of forecasting,
identifying any outliers, finding hidden trends,
and use these to act on key business drivers.
Another major benefit of using the enterprise edition is the ability to federate
users, groups, and single sign-on with IAM Federation,
SAML, open ID connect,
or AWS directory service for Microsoft Active Directory.
So no matter how you authenticate your users,
they can be integrated seamlessly into QuickSight. Now for security,
you have the ability to grant granular permission to AWS data,
grant row level access.
Encrypt the data at rest,
and also access private data on premise or in AWS
virtual private cloud or VPC. Let's head to a demo and check it out.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the demo on Amazon QuickSight.
Now the first thing I'll note is I'll be doing this demo in the US-East-one
region or the North Virginia region.
Let's go ahead and navigate into QuickSight.
We can do that by typing in QuickSight into the search bar and then selecting
QuickSight.
Now, since I don't have a QuickSight account set up,
let's go ahead and sign up for QuickSight
from here. We can either select the standard edition or the enterprise edition,
and you can see some of the benefits of each of the editions,
and kind of what they offer and the pricing as well. For this demonstration,
I'll go ahead and select the standard edition.
Now from here,
we need to kind of set up a few configurations and some information about our
new QuickSight account. I'll go ahead and type in that information. Now,
now the next set of boxes here will allow us to connect different data
sources to our QuickSight account.
So we can enable auto discovery of data and users for Amazon
Redshift, Amazon RDS, and AWS IAM services.
We can also enable QuickSight to access our Athena databases.
We can also allow QuickSight to auto discover our S3 buckets.
So if we select this option,
we can choose from any of the buckets that we want to have Amazon QuickSight
be able to auto discover. Basically be able to create graphs,
charts, and analysis and dashboards with data in our S3 buckets.
So this is a place that you would start if you want to run analysis on data that
resides in an S3 bucket, but for the analysis that we're going to run,
we're just going to upload a data set and we'll upload it directly into the
SPICE capacity.
Go ahead and finish the QuickSight setup.
This will take just a few moments to go ahead and create the QuickSight account
for us. Now, whenever we start a new analysis, we need to choose a data source.
So we'll just go ahead and select a new data set.
Now to get started with an analysis, we need to create a dataset.
We can select from any of the following data sources,
or we can upload a file and go ahead and start the analysis there.
I'll go ahead and that right now,
once I select the file,
it's going to go ahead and give us a little preview of what that file looks
like.
This is just web and social analytics data from a website that
users actually visit. Next,
it tells us how much space this is going to take up in our SPICE,
which is 296 kilobytes. So we'll go ahead and visualize this data.
Now, once the data is loaded into the SPICE,
we can start our visualization process. We can start visualizing our data.
You can see in the top menu bar, we have the add button,
the undo button and the redo button.
The add button allows us to add a new visual, add a title, description,
add a new calculated field, or add some new parameter to our visualizations.
Now underneath the menu bar, we have our data set that we're analyzing,
and we also have the attributes or the fields list for that dataset.
And you can see the little icon beside the fields list or the attributes.
It lets you know what type of attribute it is. Now below the fields list,
we have the visualization types,
so we can select from any of these different visualization types.
Things like key performance indicators, gauge charts,
horizontal stacked bar charts. We have box plots.
We have funnel charts. We have scatter plots.
We have all types of graphs and charts that we can choose from. Now,
this little lightening icon is the auto graph.
It essentially is a smart way to visualize your data.
Let's go ahead and test out the auto graph. Let's go in and select date.
And then we'll go ahead and select mailing list adds.
Now by just selecting those two attributes,
the auto graph is going to go ahead and create a chart for us. Now,
the auto graph that an okay job,
but let's go ahead and go up in the field wells and we can kind of filter out
the results or we can change how different things are aggregated or
the different value types that it selects.
So let's go ahead and aggregate this by year.
So that is a much better graph for us.
Let's see what it looks like when we aggregate it by the month.
That shows us the number of mailing list adds or the people that signed up for
our mailing list for every month.
You can see the number increases over time.
Let's go ahead and add another graph. We can select add,
and then add visual.
Let's create a scatter plot of the unique desktop users and the unique mobile
users.
We can do that by selecting the scatter plot visualization type and
for the X axis, we're going to use the desktop uniques,
for the y-axis we're going to use mobile uniques,
and then for the group in color, we'll go ahead and use date. Now again,
the date is aggregated by the day.
So let's go ahead and make it aggregated by the month.
Once we aggregate it by month, we can hover over each one of these icons.
We can see in December 2016,
we had a unique number of desktop visitors of 1.5 million and
mobile users at 634,000.
And we can hover over each one of these little dots to see the month and the
unique visitors for desktop versus mobile.
Now this is just a simple analysis,
but you can start to see how easy it is to start creating visualizations within
QuickSight. Let's go ahead and share this dashboard.
We can do that by selecting share,
and we can either publish the dashboard or we can share the analysis.
Now let's go ahead and publish the dashboard. We'll go ahead and give it a name
and we'll go ahead and publish the dashboard.
Once we create the dashboard, we can manage the access to that dashboard.
So we can go ahead and create and add new users who can actually access this
dashboard. Now we don't have any other users set up in this group,
so we would need to set up more users in our QuickSight account to add new
users, to be able to view this dashboard.
So that's the end of this demo everyone.
There are a ton of features that I didn't obviously go over that QuickSight has,
but go ahead and create your own standard edition QuickSight account.
Play around with some data and see what you can visualize.
You'd be surprised the amount of cool visualizations that you can create.
So good luck everyone, and happy visualizing.
So what's the verdict? Let's go over some pros and cons.
The SPICE engine allows you to take advantage of blazing fast responses when
interacting with dashboards.
Its integration with AWS data sources and non AWS sources is
simple and easy to set up.
The interface that AWS provides is intuitive and it's easy to learn how to use.
They make it pretty simple to create some stunning visualizations.
As a BI tool,
there is no need to license software and set up and maintain infrastructure.
And finally, you only pay for what you use.
Even if you have an unpredictable number of users,
the pay per session pricing model is cost-effective.
There are no upfront costs or long-term commitments. Now for some of the cons,
QuickSight does have a variety of visualization types,
however some useful visualization types are notably missing. For example,
candlestick graphs, Gantt charts, and high and low close charts.
I suspect as QuickSight grows as a service,
more of these visualization types will be integrated. So stay tuned.
Another con is how data that is stored in SPICE is refreshed.
Depending on your QuickSight edition subscription,
your dashboards can be automated to refresh at a minimum of every hour.
If you have a need to create real-time dashboards and visualizations,
event driven based architectures will need to be used to automate the refresh
of your SPICE data sets. For example,
using AWS Glue and Lambda to create an ETL pipeline to
automatically refresh your SPICE datasets. So should you invest,
evaluate or revisit?
Well, my recommendation is to evaluate.
QuickSight is a lightweight and easy to use BI tool.
If your organization is experimenting with different BI tools,
then give QuickSight a trial and see if it meets your needs,
especially if your data is stored in AWS data sources,
quick site can easily be set up and also at a low cost.
If your organization is already using another BI tool,
the pricing model and fully managed features of QuickSight could help save your
organization time and money,
depending on the complexity of your data analysis and the types of
visualizations you need to build, QuickSight may or may not meet your needs.
Go ahead, give QuickSight a trial and see what you think. So that's it!
Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus,
and I hope to see you next time on AWS Service Spotlight.