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Amazon QuickSight: An Overview
Amazon QuickSight is a machine-learning-powered business intelligence (BI) that is scalable, serverless, and embeddable. AWS QuickSight allows you to create multiple interactive dashboards and also publish them for public view. One of the main advantages of QuickSight is that it can be accessed from any kind of device.
Your created Amazon QuickSight BI dashboard can be easily embedded into your websites or applications. As mentioned above, AWS QuickSight is serverless, so it can scale to thousands of users. But you do not need to manage any infrastructure. The pricing for AWS QuickSight is applicable only when the user has access to their dashboards or reports.
How does Amazon QuickSight Work?
To create Amazon QuickSight with interactive dashboards and insights, you have to:
- Collect and load data: Amazon QuickSight collects and reads data from many Amazon utilities such as Aurora, Athena, AWS Redshift, etc. AWS Quicksight can be integrated with databases, file uploads, and API-based data sources including Salesforce. Click streams, sales orders, IoT devices, and financial data are also supported by AWS QuickSight. AWS QuickSight provides the ability to upload data in a file or as an AWS S3 bucket to the end users.
- Connect to data: Amazon QuickSight has the capability to connect to data irrespective of the location. It can connect to AWS cloud, corporate data center, third-party applications, or SaaS applications. Amazon QuickSight prepares the data before the analysis. This preparation includes filtering, renaming fields, changing data types, and creating SQL queries.
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- Analyze data: Amazon QuickSight’s BI platform analyzes the data and uses a Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine (SPICE) to create charts by quickly using calculations. The engine’s storage and processing capacity eliminate the need to retrieve data every time an analysis is changed or visually updated.
- Create visualizations: Amazon QuickSight generates visualizations that users can order and customize according to their needs. This eliminates the need to perform manual extraction, transformation, and loading operations. The QuickSight workspace also provides interactive graphs, charts, tables, stories, sheets, and many other types of visuals.
The tool shares interactive dashboards, email reports, and embedded analytics that business users access to derive insights and take necessary actions. With embedded analytics, users can both view and author dashboards within the applications for their enterprise.
Benefits of AWS QuickSight
There are many benefits of using AWS QuickSight; they are listed below:
Scalability
With Amazon QuickSight, you do not have to set up, manage, or configure the server on your own. Since it is serverless architecture, it has the ability to scale automatically to thousands of clients or users. There will be no slow dashboards for the users since there is no server-side interaction even when multiple users are accessing the same data sets.
Easy Embedding
AWS QuickSight has multiple SDKs and APIs, which mainly help in changing the look and feel of your BI dashboards. This customized dashboard can be easily embedded with your websites and portals. With that, QuickSight gives you the ability to manage the versions of the dashboards and you can grant the dashboard changing privileges.
Better Insights
Since AWS has proven machine learning (ML) capabilities, the BI teams can do advanced analytics with QuickSight. The pre-built ML models or your own ML models can be used by importing the model from the AWS SageMaker. To make sure everyone understands the insights from the data, QuickSight will generate the dashboard summary in plain text format using ML.
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Answers Made Easy
Using QuickSight Q, the answers for the raised business questions will be provided even when questions are asked in the natural language. Without Q, you have to rely on BI teams to update the dashboards and data models, which obviously need more time. Q extracts business terms and uses that to get the respective data. The answers will mostly be in numbers, charts, and tables.
Cost-effective
Amazon works on a pay-per-session pricing method, so the rate is applied only when users have access to dashboards and reports. Since there is no prepaid cost or annual subscription, QuickSight is suitable for a lot of users.
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Use Cases of Amazon QuickSight
Connecting to Operational Databases
When data is collected from sales orders, clickstreams, or IoT, it is loaded in operational databases such as Amazon RDS. For visualization, data is sent to Amazon QuickSight. In Amazon QuickSight, data will be transformed into interactive dashboards, reports, and embedded analytics.
Connecting to Data Warehouses
The connection to data warehouses is similar to the connection to operational databases. The difference is only in the place where the data is sent. Here, the data will be sent to a data warehouse. So, when data is collected from sales orders, clickstreams, or IoT, it is loaded in data warehouses such as Amazon Redshift. For visualization, data is sent to Amazon QuickSight where data will be transformed into interactive dashboards, reports, and embedded analytics.
Connecting to Data Lakes
When data from data lakes, such as Amazon S3, is collected, it is loaded into the AWS Glue crawler and then into the AWS Glue data catalog. Once this process is completed, data is transferred to Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift spectrum, or Amazon EMR. From here, data is transferred to QuickSight to perform visualization.
AWS QuickSight Pricing
Amazon QuickSight is the first BI service that comes with pay-per-session pricing. This means that it was cost-effective in terms of large-scale deployments. Pay-per-session means that companies have to pay only when the users have access to dashboards or reports.
AWS QuickSight has two editions to differentiate pricing:
- Standard edition
- Enterprise edition
Standard edition
This edition is for personal use, to be precise personal data analysis and exploration. It is available only for authors or dashboard publishers for US$9/month with an annual subscription or US$12 for monthly payments.
Enterprise edition
This edition is for large-scale use. It is available both for authors or dashboard publishers and readers. The pricing for readers is US$5/month for a user. But the pricing in terms of readers session capacity is US$250/month for every 500 sessions. In the case of an author, the pricing is US$18/month with an annual subscription and US$24 for the monthly subscription.
Conclusion
I hope this blog gives you some insights into AWS Amplify. We all know AWS is the world’s largest cloud platform. Without a doubt, Amazon QuickSight is one of the best services in the view of businesses. If you are more interested in AWS service, do not forget to enroll in our AWS Certification to learn more about AWS.
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