How Blinkist Built Their Data Pipeline with Amazon Redshift

Blinkist 

Blinkist transforms the big ideas from the world’s best nonfiction books into powerful little packs users can read or listen to in 15 minutes. At first, they started selling their services through a pretty basic website, and monitored statistics through Google Analytics. Unfortunately, visitor statistics gathered from Google Analytics didn’t match the ones engineers computed. This is one of the reasons why Blinkist decided to move to the AWS cloud.

They choose a central Redshift warehouse where data flow in from user apps, backend and web frontend (for visitors tracking). To get data to Redshift, data is streamed with Kinesis Firehose, also using Amazon Cloudfront, Lambda and Pinpoint. The engineering team at Blinkist is working on a newer pipeline where ingested data comes to Alchemist, before passing it to a central Kinesis system, and onwards to the warehouse.