Amazon Redshift vs Azure Synapse: What are the differences?

Amazon Redshift: Fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service. It is optimized for data sets ranging from a few hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and costs less than $1,000 per terabyte per year, a tenth the cost of most traditional data warehousing solutions; Azure Synapse: Analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It is an analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless on-demand or provisioned resources—at scale. It brings these two worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs.

Amazon Redshift belongs to "Big Data as a Service" category of the tech stack, while Azure Synapse can be primarily classified under "Big Data Tools".

Some of the features offered by Amazon Redshift are:

• Optimized for Data Warehousing- It uses columnar storage, data compression, and zone maps to reduce the amount of IO needed to perform queries. Redshift has a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture, parallelizing and distributing SQL operations to take advantage of all available resources.
• Scalable- With a few clicks of the AWS Management Console or a simple API call, you can easily scale the number of nodes in your data warehouse up or down as your performance or capacity needs change.
• No Up-Front Costs- You pay only for the resources you provision. You can choose On-Demand pricing with no up-front costs or long-term commitments, or obtain significantly discounted rates with Reserved Instance pricing.

On the other hand, Azure Synapse provides the following key features:

• Complete T-SQL based analytics – Generally Available
• Deeply integrated Apache Spark
• Hybrid data integration