How do i set development and staging with Amazon Redshift

Question

I want to set up tools and services with production, staging, and local development. I'd like to use Amazon Redshift, do I actually have to think about it as $180 x # of environments / month? Is there any way to have a free staging and local environment for Redshift?
What do you do to make local development easier, faster and cheaper when working with Redshift?

Answer 1

Reduce the number of nodes for the non-production systems. Queries will run slower and the total amount of storage will be reduced, but it could be more cost-effective. Or even use a "Dense Storage" 2TB node instead of several "Dense Compute" SSD instances -- they will provide more storage on less nodes.

Answer 2

As Redshift is a fork of postgres 8, you can use the Amazon-provided postgresql 8.4 JDBC or ODBC drivers, and point them to a locally running postgres 8 instance. This works well during development, since what works here will usually work on your production system (there are some exceptions).

Or you can just separate table on your Redshift cluster to run non-production activities. This might good for you test suite and "final testing" development.