8 – Choose the best-performing compute solution

How do you select the best-performing options for your analytics workload?

The definition of best-performing will mean different things to different stakeholders, so gathering all stakeholders’ input in the decision process is key. Define performance and cost goals by balancing business and application requirements. Then evaluate the overall efficiency of the compute solution against those goals using metrics emitted from the solution.

ID	Priority	Best practice
☐ BP 8.1	Recommended	Identify analytics solutions that best suit your technical challenges.
☐ BP 8.2	Recommended	Provision compute resources to the location of the data storage.
☐ BP 8.3	Recommended	Define and measure the computing performance metrics.
☐ BP 8.4	Recommended	Continually identify under-performing components and fine-tune the infrastructure or application logic.

For more details, refer to the following information:

• AWS Whitepaper – Overview of Amazon Web Services: Analytics

• AWS Big Data Blog: Building high-quality benchmark tests for Amazon Redshift using Apache JMeter

• AWS Big Data Blog: Top 10 performance tuning techniques for Amazon Redshift