DO Kubernetes is well-suited for: - deploying APIs - deploying workers - log collection and analysis (ie ELK stack) - deploying Helm charts and anything that can be mapped on to K8s concepts Less appropriate for anything requiring no public Internet access (ie VPC only). Less appropriate for anything requiring integration with the DO app platform via VPC, at the moment.
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.
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.
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.
DigitalOcean is the most affordable and straightforward of the hosted Kubernetes options we evaluated. All features that we require are supported without an excess of complication of extraneous features. Straightforward billing is also very important for us in comparison to the Big Three cloud hosts, which have very complicated billing practices. DigitalOcean also provides a platform with very little vendor lock-in.
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.
