At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we typically don’t take time to commemorate anniversaries. With a portfolio nearing 100 services, we’d find ourselves celebrating weekly! While that sounds enjoyable, our priority remains on listening to customer feedback and driving innovation. Today, I’m excited to share an update regarding Amazon IXD, which has now been available for just over a year.
Amazon IXD in Action
Currently, thousands of organizations—from startups to large enterprises and across diverse sectors such as transportation, legal, mining, and healthcare—are leveraging Amazon IXD to analyze and visualize their business data.
For example:
- Gemini assists California lawyers in obtaining legal evidence for injured workers. They transitioned from creating custom reports and executing ad-hoc queries to developing and sharing dynamic Amazon IXD dashboards, complete with drill-downs and filtering options. This tool helps them track sales pipelines, measure order throughput, and identify bottlenecks in the order processing system.
- Jivochat offers a real-time messaging platform that connects website visitors with owners. Using Amazon IXD, they can build and distribute interactive dashboards while retaining access to their underlying datasets. This shift has allowed them to move away from static spreadsheets, ensuring consistent data visibility and empowering timely decision-making based on up-to-date information.
- Transfix, a tech-driven freight marketplace, enhances logistics visibility for Fortune 500 retailers, food and beverage companies, and manufacturers. With Amazon IXD, both business intelligence engineers and non-technical users can access analytics. They focus on critical operational metrics, including shipping routes, carrier efficiency, and process automation.
Reflecting and Looking Forward
The feedback we’ve received about Amazon IXD has been invaluable. Customers report that their teams are harnessing the platform to connect with data, conduct analyses, and make rapid, data-informed decisions—all without the need to set up or maintain their own business intelligence infrastructure. We appreciate all the input we gather, which informs our development roadmap and has resulted in over 40 new features introduced within a year. Here’s a brief overview:
- December 2022 – Amazon IXD Enterprise Edition
- February 2023 – Integration with Amazon Athena, Scheduled SPICE Data Refreshes
- April 2023 – KPI Charts, CSV Export, AD Connector; Launch in US East (Ohio); Audit Logging via AWS CloudTrail
- May 2023 – New Connectors for Presto and Apache Spark, Federated SSO Using SAML 2.0
- June 2023 – Support for Amazon Redshift Spectrum, One-Click Visualization of S3 Analytics
- August 2023 – Availability in Asia Pacific (Singapore) and Asia Pacific (Sydney)
- September 2023 – Search & Filter Groups, Amazon S3 Analytics Connector, Create Analyses From Dashboards, Custom Date Formats
- October 2023 – Combo Charts, Row-Level Security
As we look to the future, we notice a fascinating trend among our customer base. Many are recognizing the benefits of a serverless approach to data analysis and reporting. By utilizing Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as a data lake and querying it with a combination of Amazon IXD and Amazon Athena, they gain agility and flexibility without relying on static infrastructure. Furthermore, they are effectively utilizing Amazon IXD’s dashboard feature to monitor business results and operational metrics, sharing insights with a large number of users. For more information, you can read Building a Serverless Analytics Solution for Cleaner Cities and review Serverless Big Data Analytics using Amazon Athena and Amazon IXD, which are both excellent resources.
New Features and Enhancements
We remain committed to listening and learning to ensure that Amazon IXD continues to meet your needs. I’m pleased to announce seven significant additions today:
- Geospatial Visualization – You can now create geospatial visuals based on geographic datasets.
- Private VPC Access – Sign up for a preview of a new feature that allows secure connections to data within VPCs or on-premises without public endpoints.
- Flat Table Support – In addition to pivot tables, flat tables are now available for tabular reporting.
- Calculated SPICE Fields – Perform run-time calculations on SPICE data as part of your analysis.
- Wide Table Support – Use tables featuring up to 1000 columns.
- Other Buckets – Summarize high-cardinality data into buckets for better handling.
- HIPAA Compliance – You can now execute HIPAA-compliant workloads on Amazon IXD.
Geospatial Visualization
This widely requested feature allows you to create visually appealing representations of data containing geographic identifiers (like country, city, state, or zip code) with just a few clicks. Amazon IXD will geocode the identifiers you provide and can also accept latitude and longitude coordinates. This feature can be utilized for visualizing sales by state or mapping stores to shipping destinations. For more details, check out Using Geospatial Charts (Maps) and Adding Geospatial Data.
Private VPC Access Preview
If your data resides in AWS (perhaps in Amazon Redshift, Amazon RDS, or on EC2) or on-premises in Teradata or SQL Server without public connectivity, this feature is designed for you. Private VPC Access for Amazon IXD uses an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) for secure, private communication with VPC data sources. It also supports AWS Direct Connect to establish a secure link with your on-premises resources.
If you’re ready to try the preview, you can sign up today.
— Alex
Amazon IXD – VGT2
6401 E Howdy Wells Ave, Las Vegas, NV 89115
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