Customers who don’t need to set up a VPN or a private connection to AWS often use public endpoints to access AWS. Although this is acceptable for testing out the services, most production workloads need a secure connection to their VPC on AWS.Although this is acceptable for testing out the services, most production workloads need a secure connection to their VPC on AWS. If you’re running your production data warehouse on Amazon Redshift, you can run your queries in Amazon Redshift query editor or use Amazon WorkSpaces from Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to connect to Amazon Redshift securely and analyze and graph a data summary in your favorite business intelligence (BI) or data visualization desktop tool.
With Amazon Redshift, you can query petabytes of structured and semi-structured data across your data warehouse, operational database, and your data lake using standard SQL. Amazon WorkSpaces is a managed, secure Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution deployed within an Amazon VPC. In this post, we show how you can run SQL queries on Amazon Redshift securely without VPN using Amazon Redshift query editor and Amazon WorkSpaces. First, we discuss how to run queries that return large datasets from the Amazon Redshift query editor using the UNLOAD command. Next, we discuss how to set up Amazon WorkSpaces and use it to securely run queries on Amazon Redshift. We cover the detailed steps for setting up Amazon WorkSpaces and show different scenarios to test Amazon Redshift queries with Amazon WorkSpaces.
The following diagram illustrates these architectures.
