AWS Announces First-Ever Pay Per Session BI Pricing for QuickSight. AWS claims to be an industry leader in business analytics services, and announced a pay per session pricing model for its QuickSight service. Amazon QuickSight is a fully managed cloud business intelligence (BI), system that provides visualization, ad-hoc analyses, and other business insight functionality. According to the company, it offers BI capabilities at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions. These costs can now be paid for individual sessions as of last week. “Pay-per-session pricing allows you to enable everyone within the organization with interactive dashboards that are data-driven and pay only when they access them,” the company stated in a blog post on Thursday, May 31. The new pricing model is available for Amazon QuickSight Enterprise Edition in all regions that are supported by AWS. It starts at $0.30 per session. The company also announced availability of Private VPC Connectivity. This allows users to securely connect QuickSight with data sources within Virtual Private Clouds. (VPCs), as well as on-premises installations. There is no need to deploy any gateway or agent. It avoids data being moved over the public Internet. Other features include:

  • Enhance interactivity in dashboards by setting parameters with onscreen controls. These controls can be set using the on-screen dropdown or text box controls.
  • URL actions to connect QuickSight dashboards with third-party applications and internal Web sites
  • Enhanced data management and administration capabilities such as: higher SPICE (QuickSight’s in-memory optimized calculation algorithm) data set limits at 25GB; hourly refresh of SPICE data; coowner permissions for dashboards; the option to share dashboards to all users; and an easy way to upgrade your account from Amazon QuickSight Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition.
  • QuickSight is now also available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo), region.

AWS stated in a blog post that QuickSight provides business analytics to organizations of all sizes. It allows them to access data stored in their Amazon Redshift data warehouse, their Amazon Relational Database Service RDS relational databases, flat files stored in S3, and (via connectors), data stored in SQL Server, PostgreSQL and on-premises MySQL databases. QuickSight can scale to accommodate thousands, hundreds, and even thousands of users per company. QuickSight is available for a free 60-day trial. More information can be found in a June 20 Webinar.