Redis: Simple to get started, scales OK, bad at durability
May 08, 2019
Redis: Simple to get started, scales OK, bad at durability
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Redis
Used only by engineering for our main production application. We use a Ruby based job system named Sidekiq that uses Redis as its backing store.
- Lots of versatility. We use it as a dumb store for string payloads, but can store a bunch of other data structures also.
- Easy to set up
- Persistence support isn't great. RDB is useless for our case (job system). AOF has *huge* performance issues, particularly when reading the file on startup after a failure.
- Again, this is more about Sidekiq, but both it and Redis were extremely quick to set up. If I consider an alternative job system (e.g., SQS or Kafka), I'd either have vendor lock-in or a lot more sophistication.
- Price
- Product Features
- Prior Experience with the Product
Prior experience. I'd used Sidekiq / Redis before, it was easy to set up, and allowed us to move quickly onto implementing the business logic of our application as opposed to struggling with operational issues.
- MySQL, Apache Kafka and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Ultimately, we needed a job system.
MySQL is attractive because it allows us to have a single transaction wrapping both the job system and main application. Unfortunately, it can also be a source of contention on a db and has poor performance.
SQS has vendor lockin, so it's out.
Kafka is nice and has partitioning... but it's also a lot more operationally sophisticated to set up.