In Azure, it is the storage to use, and in my view, the Blob Storage offers more, or finer-grained configuration options, than S3. So my recommendation would be to check in detail what is offered. As the Blob Storage is more or less a Microsoft exclusive product, the "interoperability" is more limited than, for example, with S3. The S3 is more widely adopted, and if you cannot exclude a migration scenario from one cloud provider to another, additional effort is needed.
Redis has been a great investment for our organization as we needed a solution for high speed data caching. The ramp up and integration was quite easy. Redis handles automatic failover internally, so no crashes provides high availability. On the fly scaling scale to more/less cores and memory as and when needed.
Easy for developers to understand. Unlike Riak, which I've used in the past, it's fast without having to worry about eventual consistency.
Reliable. With a proper multi-node configuration, it can handle failover instantly.
Configurable. We primarily still use Memcache for caching but one of the teams uses Redis for both long-term storage and temporary expiry keys without taking on another external dependency.
Fast. We process tens of thousands of RPS and it doesn't skip a beat.
We had some difficulty scaling Redis without it becoming prohibitively expensive.
Redis has very simple search capabilities, which means its not suitable for all use cases.
Redis doesn't have good native support for storing data in object form and many libraries built over it return data as a string, meaning you need build your own serialization layer over it.
We will definitely continue using Redis because: 1. It is free and open source. 2. We already use it in so many applications, it will be hard for us to let go. 3. There isn't another competitive product that we know of that gives a better performance. 4. We never had any major issues with Redis, so no point turning our backs.
Blob storage is fairly simple, with several different options/settings that can be configured. The file explorer has enhanced its usability. Some areas could be improved, such as providing more details or stats on how many times a file has been accessed. It is an obvious choice if you're already using Azure/Entra.
It is quite simple to set up for the purpose of managing user sessions in the backend. It can be easily integrated with other products or technologies, such as Spring in Java. If you need to actually display the data stored in Redis in your application this is a bit difficult to understand initially but is possible.
Microsoft has improved its customer service standpoint over the years. The ability to chat with an issue, get a callback, schedule a call or work with an architecture team(for free) is a huge plus. I can get mentorship and guidance on where to go with my environment without pushy sales tactics. This is very refreshing. Typically support can get me to where I need to be on the first contact, which is also nice.
The support team has always been excellent in handling our mostly questions, rarely problems. They are responsive, find the solution and get us moving forward again. I have never had to escalate a case with them. They have always solved our problems in a very timely manner. I highly commend the support team.
Azure Premium Blob offers better latency than competitors. It works best with the Azure ecosystem, and competitors lack it. Azure Blob even stands out in storage durability, providing up to 16 nines. It can have various use cases that can suit all the organisation's needs. The Azure Blob solution can also be deployed on-premises.
We are big users of MySQL and PostgreSQL. We were looking at replacing our aging web page caching technology and found that we could do it in SQL, but there was a NoSQL movement happening at the time. We dabbled a bit in the NoSQL scene just to get an idea of what it was about and whether it was for us. We tried a bunch, but I can only seem to remember Mongo and Couch. Mongo had big issues early on that drove us to Redis and we couldn't quite figure out how to deploy couch.
Redis has helped us increase our throughput and server data to a growing amount of traffic while keeping our app fast. We couldn't have grown without the ability to easily cache data that Redis provides.
Redis has helped us decrease the load on our database. By being able to scale up and cache important data, we reduce the load on our database reducing costs and infra issues.
Running a Redis node on something like AWS can be costly, but it is often a requirement for scaling a company. If you need data quickly and your business is already a positive ROI, Redis is worth the investment.
