Why tombola chose Graviton-powered RG instances for Amazon Redshift
Big Data Blog
This article describes how tombola, an online bingo operator, benchmarked and migrated its Amazon Redshift infrastructure from RA3 (Intel Xeon) to RG (Graviton4) instances.
- Cold-cache ETL queries ran 1.57× faster on RG; warm-cache queries maintained 1.52× speedup advantage
- Under concurrent load, RG completed 33% more queries and 46% more queries in mixed realistic workloads
- Heavy ETL queries achieved up to 2.27× speedup under concurrent load, the closest scenario to production
- Amazon S3 Tables (Iceberg) queries ran 45–73% faster on RG across varying complexity levels
- 4:3 node mapping (4 RA3 to 3 RG nodes) reduces infrastructure costs by 25% while improving performance
- Elastic Resize migration path enables zero-downtime transition with read-only source cluster during transfer
Tombola's evidence-based engineering approach and comprehensive benchmarking validated RG's performance gains, enabling confident production migration with improved cost efficiency and architectural benefits including removal of Redshift Spectrum overhead.
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