Upgrading to RA3 node types - Amazon Redshift
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Upgrading to RA3 node types

To upgrade your existing node type to RA3, you have the following options to change the node type:

  • Restore from a snapshot – Amazon Redshift uses the most recent snapshot of your cluster and restores it to create a new RA3 cluster. As soon as the cluster creation is complete (usually within minutes), RA3 nodes are ready to run your full production workload. As compute is separate from storage, hot data is brought in to the local cache at fast speeds thanks to a large networking bandwidth. If you restore from the latest DC2 snapshot, RA3 preserves hot block information of the DC2 workload and populates its local cache with the hottest blocks. For more information, see Restoring a cluster from a snapshot.

    To keep the same endpoint for your applications and users, you can rename the new RA3 cluster with the same name as the original DC2 cluster. To rename the cluster, modify the cluster in the Amazon Redshift console or ModifyCluster API operation. For more information, see Renaming clusters or ModifyCluster API operation in the Amazon Redshift API Reference.

  • Elastic resize – resize the cluster using elastic resize. When you use elastic resize to change node type, Amazon Redshift automatically creates a snapshot, creates a new cluster, deletes the old cluster, and renames the new cluster. The elastic resize operation can be run on-demand or can be scheduled to run at a future time. You can quickly upgrade your existing DC2 node type clusters to RA3 with elastic resize. For more information, see Elastic resize.

The following table shows recommendations when upgrading to RA3 node types. (These recommendations also apply to reserved nodes.)

The recommendations in this table are starting cluster node types and sizes but depend on the computing requirements of your workload. To better estimate your requirements, consider conducting a proof of concept (POC) that uses Test Drive to run potential configurations. Provision a cluster for your POC data warehouse instead of Redshift Serverless. For more information about conducting a proof of concept, see Conduct a proof of concept (POC) for Amazon Redshift in the Amazon Redshift Database Developer Guide.

Existing node type Existing number of nodes Recommended new node type Upgrade action

dc2.8xlarge

2–15

ra3.4xlarge

Create 2 nodes of ra3.4xlarge for every 1 node of dc2.8xlarge1.

dc2.8xlarge

16–128

ra3.16xlarge

Create 1 node of ra3.16xlarge for every 2 nodes of dc2.8xlarge1.

dc2.large

1–4

none

Keep existing dc2.large cluster.

dc2.large

5–15

ra3.xlplus

Create 3 nodes of ra3.xlplus for every 8 nodes of dc2.large1.

dc2.large

16–32

ra3.4xlarge

Create 1 node of ra3.4xlarge for every 8 nodes of dc2.large1,2.

1Extra nodes might be needed depending on workload requirements. Add or remove nodes based on the compute requirements of your required query performance.

2Clusters with the dc2.large node type are limited to 32 nodes.

The minimum number of nodes for some RA3 node types is 2 nodes. Take this into consideration when creating an RA3 cluster.