Redis is awesome!
November 23, 2019
Redis is awesome!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Redis
We're using Redis in many ways and across different departments in the organization. The most simple use case is to store locks so the backend services can reject duplicated API requests. A little more advanced use case is to use it as a buffer for queues of messages or requests. We're also exploring ways to use the new Graph type to support Data Science models in development.
- Redis has many data types that suit a variety of use cases such as caching, message queues, graphs.
- Redis is an open-sourced tool with a growing community, as well as 3rd party support (Amazon managed version) if you need additional help with the set-up.
- Both the clients and the command line tool are easy to use and well-documented.
- Scaling has always been an issue with Redis. Routing to shards is not automatic.
- There's no GUI for managing the keys and values stored in Redis. The command-line tool is useful but not friendly to non-engineering users.
- The data types as in data structures have many choices, but inside of the key-value pair, the content is always stored as a string.
- Redis is very easy to set up, not only as a stand-alone service but also in a local Docker container. This makes local development and testing extremely easy.
- Redis is considerably cheaper than a fully managed key-value store such as DynamoDB.
- Redis can provide the cache layer a lot of services need, which improves the performance of those services.
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Prior Experience with the Product
What made us go with Redis was that the product is easy to set up and easy to use. Although not having GUI was not ideal, but the command-line tool and the native clients gave us the essentials to start developing products with it.
DynamoDB is a fully managed key-value store by Amazon. It provides more powerful indexing to the tables, which certainly increases the performance if searching is what you need. However, it is also a lot more expensive to use compared to Redis. If your use case is more on the basic side, Redis would be good enough and save you a lot of money.