Dead-Simple Configuration and Scary-Fast Performance
March 20, 2019

Dead-Simple Configuration and Scary-Fast Performance

D. Marshall Lemcoe Jr. | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Redis

Our organization uses Redis for two main tasks at our organization. First, Redis is used as a traditional in-memory key/store warehouse for a cache system that contains over 400 million items, on average. Using Redis with modern DDR4 memory, we have seen incredible latency savings when it comes to keystore look-ups. Second, we use Redis to manage a distributed queue, such that numerous worker nodes can subscribe to tasks and complete them in an organized way.
  • Key/Value datastore. Redis is incredibly fast when it comes to simple "phone book-style" lookups.
  • Queue orchestration and management when there are many nodes in a system that need to all be on the same page.
  • Dead-simple installation process. It takes about 3 minutes to install Redis and get the service started.
  • I am unable to come up with any legitimate cons, but one thing to note is that Redis, by default, will be installed with no password, leaving it open to the world if the host is not locked-down with a firewall.
  • Redis requires very little in terms of host hardware, and we have Redis running on tiny servers (2GB of memory and 2 cores, for example).
  • Redis has also replaced multiple traditional datastores like MySQL and PostgreSQL, especially when it comes to logging and caching.
Yes - Redis replaced MySQL and Memcached as the datastore we used for caching and queue management, as well as billions of daily key/value lookups. As our business continued to grow, we realized that a relational database was not the best tool for those tasks, and Redis made an immediate impact by allowing us to get rid of hardware while dramatically decreasing latency.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Reputation
It's open source! It costs nothing to get the software, and costs just about nothing to play around with it in a VPS or in a local virtual machine.

Moreover, Redis has a fantastic reputation in the software development community, and there was never a thought to use something other than Redis when we began making our switch.
The two alternatives that I listed are not exact replacements for Redis, but get to the same place, in terms of what they are able to do. Redis' main advantage over CouchDB and Cassandra is speed, and for flat data structures, Redis will win every time.
Redis is the perfect tool if you are looking to increase the speed of a key/value datastore or cache, as well as centralizing your queue management tasks to a dead-simple and incredibly fast database.

That said, it is not well-suited to tasks that have historically been reserved for relational datastores like MySQL or Postgres. Redis lacks relational database features and does not have a dynamic language like SQL to interact with.

Redis™* Feature Ratings

Performance
10
Availability
9
Concurrency
10
Security
3
Scalability
10
Data model flexibility
5
Deployment model flexibility
6