Amazon Redshift DC2 migration approach with a customer case study

This article details a retail enterprise's successful migration from Amazon Redshift DC2 to RA3 instances using a Blue-Green deployment approach.

• DC2 deprecation announced April 2025; customers must migrate to RA3 or Serverless
• Customer migrated 16-node dc2.8xlarge cluster to 6-node ra3.16xlarge for cost efficiency
• Blue-Green deployment enabled safe migration with quick rollback capability
• Classic Resize reduced write-unavailable period to 16 minutes
• ETL queries improved 23-28% faster on RA3; BI queries initially slower without optimization
• Concurrency scaling improved RA3 BI query performance by 21%
• Materialized views and AutoMV feature optimized performance on RA3's expanded storage
• RA3 separated compute/storage architecture supports independent scaling and cost management

The migration demonstrates RA3's advantages for long-running workloads while requiring optimization strategies for short queries, ultimately achieving cost efficiency and improved ETL performance.