Redshift Observatory

Introduction

My name is Max Ganz II. I am an Amazon Redshift specialist offering consultancy services. Please excuse the simple site; I'm an engineer.

I've began using Redshift the day it went live in 2012 until mid 2013, and have since 2017 worked with and only with Redshift. When I'm not working for a client, I'm investigating Redshift in my own time, and I've done a lot of that. You have to, because there's no other way to know what Redshift is doing.

Services

Anything to do with Redshift is on the menu, but commonly;

Pricing

For shorter jobs, up to a week or two (so including the introductory lecture to internals), I do the work and you pay me what it was worth to you. No expectations.

For longer jobs, we'll have to talk and work something out - I can't spend a month working on something for a client to find it wasn't worth much to them. I prefer fixed price work, rather than per-hour, and to get paid on results (which happens anyway - if you hire me and turns out I can't help, I can't and won't charge you for that), but none of that is a hard requirement.

Client Reviews

All reviewers have given specific consent to being contacted. I encourage you to do so. Every client is asked to review, every review given is posted here, wholly unmodified, always, and you can check that with the client. Of course, you can't know if I were not to put up a review, but this is the best I can do for transparency.

2024-11, Cluster cost reduction, Anodot Ltd., Israel. Senior Backend Team Lead, Raz Kofman.

After couple of years working with Amazon Redshift, suffering from poor performance and high costs, we reached out for Max. Max helped out data engineers to understand better how Redshift works, how to monitor it, and what can be done to improve the performance and to reduce the costs. During the time we worked with Max, we were able to double our throughput, and to reduce the cost significantly on the same time. Working with Max required considerable effort on our team. Max provides continuous insights and recommendations that should be considered/implemented and creates a lot of internal action items. So when considering working with Max one should make sure to have enough development resources in order to get the most out of it. On the personal level, I enjoyed very much working with Max. Always pleasant and professional.

2024-10, Emergency fire-fighting, Resilience Lab Inc., USA. Staff Analytics Engineer, Andrew Knoff.

Max is clearly very knowledgeable about Redshift, and guided us through an unexpected outage as quickly as we get could him access. He knows the ins and outs beyond what AWS publishes, and where what they've published is actually wrong, and could quickly diagnose what had gone wrong on our cluster using his deep expertise. He was candid about Redshift's utility and didn't shy away from telling us it probably wasn't the right fit for our use case rather than pushing us to optimize it with him. He balanced technical knowledge well with putting our needs first. If you have any issues with or questions about Redshift, I don't doubt he would be of immense help.

2024-03, Introductory lecture, Prismforce Inc., India. Senior Technical Architect, Amit Singh.

Max has deep knowledge on internals of Redshift and has helped us on understanding the entire workflow. We were in an ambiguous situation to choose AWS Redshift, but based on Max's concrete case studies we were able to make an accurate decision. He also helped us with tooling for our analytics use case and we are happy to make the decision. Thank you Max, and we would refer you if some of my acquaintance is exploring AWS Redshift.

2023-03, Introductory lecture, Railsware Solutions FZ-LLC, Ukraine. Associate Director and Technical Lead, Anatoliy Yevpack.

We are extremely grateful for the assistance that Max has provided us as a consultant. He shared numerous insights into the internals of Redshift, which quickly proved to be invaluable and unveiled the actual problem we were facing. Gaining an understanding of the underlying reasons behind the issues we encountered led us to realize that we were employing the wrong tool for the task. Consequently, we made the decision to transition away from Redshift. This not only saved us a substantial amount of money but also spared us from those issues. We should have reached out to Max much sooner!

2022-12, Emergency fire-fighting, EdOps Inc., USA. CTO and Co-Founder, Josh Marks.

We feel extremely grateful for the deep support of Max @ RedShift Observatory. Redshift is an extremely difficult beast to tame and the behavior of our instance was often inscrutable. We feel extremely grateful to have worked with Max, Redshift whisperer, who was able to quickly diagnose problems and prioritize the steps to vastly improve performance. He has deep technical knowledge of the product, a warm comical wit, and can challenge Dos Equis' most interesting man. I highly recommend that you work with him. Feel free to contact me.

2022-08, Emergency fire-fighting, Starred B.V., The Netherlands. Lead Software Engineer, Gijs van Lammeren.

In 2022 we were running a Redshift migration project for our BI solution and we experienced performance issues. With Max’s guidance and knowledge we come to the conclusion that Redshift was not a good fit for our use-case, due to it underlaying architecture. I would describe Max as a very knowledgeable person, and the collaboration was as professional and pleasant.

Redshift Technical Resources

All my own work, and nothing like this is available anywhere else.

Contact Me

Email max dot ganz at redshift-observatory dot ch



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