Data warehousing built for large-scale analytical queries
Amazon Redshift is a cloud data warehouse built for running complex analytical queries across large volumes of data the kind of aggregation and reporting workload that would be slow or expensive to run against a standard production database directly.
Running heavy analytical queries against the same database serving live application traffic is a reliable way to degrade both. A dedicated data warehouse separates reporting and analytics workloads from production, so a large query never risks slowing down a real user's request.
We use Redshift when a product's reporting or analytics needs outgrow what's practical to query directly against a production database separating heavy aggregation workloads from the systems serving live traffic.