Likelihood to Recommend We use Astra DB to improve our management systems. Storing data has become hassle-free and quite simple. When launching a Cassandra-based cloud application, Astra DB is exactly what you need. In addition to the standard training programs and videos, the extended support and training require significant additional effort to activate and cover which I feel is a bit more tedious task.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros It's very resilient and scalable, no downtime and no issues scaling up to meet our needs. Low latency reads and writes Cost effective - The on demand model worked out cheaper than running our own clusters Great support for any of our questions or issues Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Need better fine-grained Security options. The support team sometimes requires the escalate button pressed on tickets, to get timely responses. I will say, once the ticket is escalated, action is taken. They require better documentation on the migration of data. The three primary methods for migrating large data volumes are bulk, Cassandra Data Migrator, and ZDM (Zero Downtime Migration Utility). Over time I have become very familiar will all three of these methods; however, through working with the Services team and the support team, it seemed like we were breaking new ground. I feel if the utilities were better documented and included some examples and/or use cases from large data migrations; this process would have been easier. One lesson learned is you likely need to migrate your application servers to the same cloud provider you host Astra on; otherwise, the latency is too large for latency-sensitive applications. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability It's a great product but suffers with counters. This isn't a deal breaker but lets down what is otherwise a good all round solution
Read full review 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.
Read full review Support Rating Their response time is fast, in case you do not contact them during business hours, they give a very good follow-up to your case. They also facilitate video calls if necessary for debugging.
Read full review 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.
Gene Baker Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Read full review Implementation Rating Whitelisting of the AWS lambda functions.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We know Astra is built on Cassandra / Kubernetes / Stargate and can work on any cloud. The competitors we reviewed are cloud specific and create a lock in. We also have the option to run Cassandra / Stargate ourselves if we wanted to. The competitors don’t give that option
Read full review 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.
Read full review Scalability As per my experience, I never faced issues of scalability with Astra DB. We don't have at the moment a use case with millions of requests or users, so I can't give full score because of my limited use case.
Read full review Return on Investment The high availability capabilities of Astra DB can assist in reducing downtime, which is crucial for revenue-generating applications. The developer-friendly features of Astra DB, as well as support for known query languages, can help expedite development, save development time, and minimize labor costs. This can result in a shorter time to market and a higher ROI. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots