Do you find the prospect of modernizing your existing apps a bit scary? Where do you start? How long will it take, and how much will it cost? Is it worth it?
Every day, Pivotal helps companies tackle this challenge. We work with customers to identify great candidate apps and plan their modernization effort. One of our common tactics involves introducing Redis to the app architecture. Redis is a high performing key-value store that’s a great fit for many use cases: holding session state, storing a database cache, or enabling in-memory analytics. When apps in Pivotal Cloud Foundry use Redis as a backing service, they perform better and scale more easily.
If you’re looking for a highly available Redis solution, Redis Labs Enterprise Cluster is a great fit. Pivotal talked to Leena Joshi, Redis Labs VP of product marketing, to learn more about Redis and their service. Check out our discussion below.
Pivotal: There are dozens upon dozens of NoSQL database options in the market. Why has Redis maintained a leading position?
Redis Labs: Redis is beloved among developers for a few reasons. First and foremost, among these is that Redis is the simplest way to get assured, unparalleled performance for any application, with the fewest number of resources. And there’s more. The flexibility of the data structures allows a variety of application scenarios to be addressed with relatively low programming effort or code complexity. With the recent introduction of modules, Redis’ extensibility to any data processing or analysis scenario has increased exponentially, making it a favorite choice for its low operational hassle and high availability. We believe the community around Redis is among the most passionate, most vocal and they contribute in various ways – there are large number of client libraries, tons of open source projects and tools built around Redis.
Pivotal: Redis has been around for awhile now, but are you seeing it evolve from being a favorite of startups to being adopted by large enterprises?
Redis Labs: As early as two years into Redis’ general availability, it was being used by some of the largest enterprises in the world because its outstanding performance and flexibility filled a need unmet by most other commercial databases. While startups continue to use Redis in their stacks, what we’re seeing now is that large enterprises who envy the lean flexible stacks of startups have started to overhaul and relook at their own frameworks. And they are finding that Redis is hard to beat on cost, performance and flexibility.
So, yes, we are seeing extensive breadth and depth of adoption. A recent customer survey showed us how they are using Redis–to solve a variety of use cases such as high speed transactions, real time data ingest, job & queue management, real time analytics, among others.
Pivotal: What are some real ways that enterprise companies are using Redis alongside existing apps?
Redis Labs: A recent customer survey showed that enterprise companies are using Redis as a key ingredient in a number of different types of applications–including mobile, e-commerce, analytics, personalization and many more. Several are using Redis as a primary datastore for their hot data, while many others are using it to deliver key functionality like real time analytics and notifications.
Pivotal: Tell us about Redis Labs Enterprise Cluster (RLEC). What are the key capabilities that Pivotal customers should know about?
Redis Labs: Redis Labs Enterprise Cluster adds a highly optimized technology layer to open source Redis, making it easy to cluster and scale seamlessly, while augmenting its high availability with cross-rack/zone/region/datacenter replication and instant automatic failover, with no data loss. RLEC also includes numerous performance enhancements that allow for stable, linearly scaling performance. The same survey of our customers validates these primary benefits of our technology. Additionally, customers value our inherent Redis expertise and the monitoring/alerting capabilities provided by our product.
Pivotal: Where do you see the value of combining apps on Pivotal Cloud Foundry with data stored in RLEC?
Redis Labs: Pivotal Cloud Foundry allows organizations to take a holistic and optimal approach to application delivery. Redis is increasing becoming a critical layer of next generation applications, particularly those that are required to provide tremendous user responsiveness, extreme low latencies as well as built-in intelligence. Combining apps on Pivotal Cloud Foundry with data stored in RLEC allows for customers to take advantage of the natively smart capabilities of Redis, while offloading the scaling, management and operations to the built-in automation of Redis Labs. It makes for an efficient, low operational overhead mechanism to achieving high scale, low latencies and high availability–all in one place.
Pivotal: What does the integration between Pivotal Cloud Foundry and RLEC look like? What did we build?
Redis Labs: We recently completed a full integration of Redis Labs Enterprise Cluster (RLEC) and BOSH on Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Originally, Redis Labs and Pivotal Cloud Foundry collaborated on a connector (the RLEC tile) for RLEC and Cloud Foundry which can be accessed through Pivotal Network. The RLEC tile in Pivotal network allowed for applications on Pivotal Cloud Foundry to connect to RLEC to take advantage of our highly available, automatically scaling Redis technology. Now, users can also take full advantage of our BOSH integration for complete application lifecycle management.
Pivotal: For someone trying to get started with RLEC, what do you suggest in terms of learning resources?
Redis Labs: There are many resources in addition to RLEC documentation that are available on our website.
- A series of blog posts on Getting Started
- A webinar on how high availability with RLEC works another on using Redis Labs with Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and one on performance troubleshooting tips.
- Datasheets and whitepapers
- Our popular How-tos
- An e-book by Dr. Josiah Carlson on Redis, one of the best written anywhere.
Also, you can email [email protected] at anytime for help with your projects.
