Tableau Server on AWS

As a business intelligence platform, Tableau Server provides comprehensive and robust capabilities for all aspects of an organization’s analytics ecosystem. These capabilities are quick and easy to deploy, and require minimal , if any, customizations. The core architecture of Tableau Server runs two of the largest data platforms in the world: Tableau Cloud and Tableau Public.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a reliable, scalable, secure, and highly performing infrastructure for the most demanding web applications—an infrastructure that matches IT costs with customer traffic patterns in real time.

This whitepaper provides technical guidance on how to deploy and configure Tableau Server on AWS. Additionally, it outlines key integrations and configurations unique to AWS products that enable you to use Tableau Server to best meet your needs.

We've also pulled out the first several pages of the whitepaper for you to read. Download the PDF on the right to read the rest.

Introduction

Organizations need to ensure that they can keep up with rapid changes that are required for global computing infrastructures. Additionally, they need to find ways to deploy and deliver applications from distributed, cloud-based services with the confidence that these applications can deliver a consistent and reliable level of service, and can withstand significant, unpredictable spikes in traffic without missing a beat. The compute resources offered by AWS meet these needs by providing a global computing infrastructure and services that simplify managing that infrastructure.

Tableau Server

Tableau Server provides business intelligence for organizations of all sizes, accessible through a browser or a mobile device. Tableau Server is built to simplify sharing and collaborating on interactive data visualizations by offering the following advantages:

• Simple User Interface – Tableau Server makes it easy to find, explore, and interact with analytic dashboards for every type of user. Powerful search capabilities and intuitive navigation controls make discovering content, users, and data sources straightforward.
• Flexible data architecture – If you have a fast database, Tableau Server can leverage that speed by maintaining live query connections back to that database. Alternatively, you can use Tableau Server to take in-memory snapshots of a data source (called extracts) and physically host that data on the Tableau Server platform.
• Automatic data and content updates – Tableau Server can refresh in-memory data extracts based on a set schedule, at specified intervals, or at incremental levels. You can also set alerts when data connections fail or use subscriptions to receive regularly scheduled emails about dashboards and reports.
• Embedded analytics – With Tableau Server, you can rapidly embed interactive dashboards within your organization’s existing web portals. Builtin sharing capabilities quickly provide HTML snippets that you can use to place Tableau Server views directly into webpages, SharePoint portals, intranet wikis, and so on.
• Scalable – Tableau Server scales with both hardware and memory to support a growing organization. Flexible content management, user permissions, and detailed administrative capabilities make managing a growing Tableau Server platform a straightforward process.
• Secure – Tableau Server gives you security permissions at any level you need. With multi-tenancy, you can create multiple sites on the server to separate users and content. You can set individual permissions for projects, dashboards, or even users.
• Mobile – You can view a dashboard from anywhere, on any device. All dashboards are automatically optimized for mobile tablets with touchsensitive UI without requiring any additional authoring or configuration.

In the next section, we’ll discuss some of the AWS services and how you can use them to run Tableau Server in the AWS cloud.