Difference between Redis Replication and Redis Sentinel - redis

I am trying to understand if the Redis replication (described here) relates to the Redis Sentinel (described here) or are totally different approaches to data replication.

You use them both together. If you have a master and a couple of slaves, replication makes sure that data between all three remains consistent, but sentinel will handle promoting a slave to a master if the master dies, redirecting new requests to the new master, and notifying someone about what has happened.

Related

Does Redis support cross replication between master/slave nodes?

Based on Redis documentation, a cluster of two Redis nodes (one Master node and one Slave node) can support replication via the slaveof directive.
However, this implies that replication is always performed from Master to Slave.
Assuming we don't use Sentinel, then in case of a failover, the Slave will have the proper data but will still be a Slave node. Thus, as soon as the Master node recovers from failure, data will either be wiped out or be as per the latest snapshot (if RDB/AOF persistence is enabled).
Now, to the question: does Redis support cross replication between Master/Slave nodes? If not, is there a way to replicate (no pun intended) such a functionality without using Sentinel?

Redis cluster on load balancer

I have setup a redis cluster with 1 master node and 2 slave nodes with sentinel running on all 3 nodes.
Prior to this setup, my application was pointing to a single node where redis instance was running.
After the clustering had been set up, where should my application point to?
Thanks.
you need more than one master nodes.
Slave is designed not writble
You can write to the master, and read from both slaves. Of course, you can also read from the master.
In most case, you should NOT write to slave, because even if you config the slave as writable, any write to slave does NOT sync to master or other slaves.
With slave you can achieve data replication. Also, reading from slaves scales out the read performance, if you set up each slave and master on distinct machine. However, you might have consistency problem, i.e. reading inconsistent data from slaves.
Redis cluster and Redis sentinel are two different concepts. If you only looking for HA I would recommend Sentinel, Redis cluster work on top of sharding which is highly distributed in nature. Redis cluster recommend to have minimum 3 masters and equal quantity of slaves for the healthy cluster.

Redis connect single instance slave (slave of) to cluster or sentinel

When running a single instance redis, I can use "slave of" to create a (or as many I like) readonly replica of this one redis node.
When using redis cluster, I split my Data into Partitons (Masters) and can create a slave for each partition.
Is it possible to treat this cluster as a single instance and connect a "slave of" Slave to this cluster which will hold a replica of all Data in the cluster and not just the partition of the connected node?
If not possible with redis cluster, is this might a working solution when using sentinel?
Our current Problem:
We are using the "slave of" feature together with keepalived to failover our redis instance on an outage of the master.
But we have lots of "slave of" slaves connected to the virtual IP of the failover setup, to deliver cached data.
Now everytime the system fails over (for maintenance reasons e.g.) all connected slaves have a timout for up to 30 seconds, when they have to resync their data with the new master.
We allready played with all possible redis config parameters but can't get this syncing time to be shorter (e.g. by relying on the replication-backlog, which isn't available on the new master after the failover).
Anyone any ideas?
a very good doc here : http://redis.io/presentation/Redis_Cluster.pdf and here http://fr.slideshare.net/NoSQLmatters/no-sql-matters-bcn-2014 (slide #9) or better https://www.javacodegeeks.com/2015/09/redis-clustering.html
If you want "slave" in Redis cluster mode, you need use replication of all nodes.
Regards,
Well, I just read this article:
https://seanmcgary.com/posts/how-to-build-a-fault-tolerant-redis-cluster-with-sentinel
The author used a single master with Redis Cluster, with 2 slaves per master, instead of one, and he let Redis Sentinel take care of the election of a slave to a master when the master is down.
You could play with this setup to see if the election of Master occurs quickly. While it's happening, clients would be served by a slave and should experience no downtime.

Redis Sentinel with 2 master after multi az netsplit

Hello stack community,
I have a question about Redis sentinel for a specific problem case. I use AWS with Multi AZ to create a sensu cluster.
On eu-central-1a I have a sensu+redis(M), a RBMQ+Sentinel and 2 others Sentinels. Same on eu-central-1b but the redis is my slave on this AZ.
What happen if there is a problem and eu-central-1a can not communicate with eu-central-1b ? What I think is that Sentinel on eu-central-1b should promote my redis slave to master, because he can not contact my redis master. So I should have 2 redis masters running together on 2 different AZ.
But when the link is retrieved between AZ, I will still have 2 masters, with 2 different datas. What will happen in this case ? One master will become a slave and data will be replicated without loss ? Do we need to restart a master and he will be a slave ?
Sentinel detects changes to the master for example
If the master goes down and is unreachable a new slave is elected. This is based on the quorum where multiple sentinels agree that the master has gone down. The failover then occurs.
Once the sentinel detects the master come back online it is then a slave I believe thus the new master continues I believe. You will loose data in the switchover from master to new master that in inevitable.
If you loose connection then yes sentinel wont work correctly as it relies on multiple sentinels to agree the master redis is down. You shouldn't use sentinel in a 2 sentinel system.
Basic solution would be for you to put a extra sentinel on another server maybe the client/application server that isn't running redis/sentinel this way you can make use of the quorum and sentinels agreeing the master is down.

Master-Slave and Publish-Subscribe connections

Assuming I have a Master-Slave deployment of Redis (1 master, 1 slave) and a client (webapp) that will manage Publish-Subscribe.
Can I Publish messages to the slave and will they be "seen" by the master?
Or should I use only the Master for Publish and the Slave for Subscribe commands?
I've been looking around but couldn't find the answer. Anyone knows?
EDIT: As #jameshfisher pointed out, the link below is regarding Redis Cluster. The comment from #lionello seems to be the correct answer:
Publishing to a slave will not propagate to the master, only the other way around.
The answer is on the cluster-spec docs:
Publish/Subscribe
In a Redis Cluster clients can subscribe to every node, and can also publish to every other node. The cluster will make sure that published messages are forwarded as needed.
The current implementation will simply broadcast each published message to all other nodes, but at some point this will be optimized either using Bloom filters or other algorithms.
For the typical data you store in Redis, you should only write to the master.
From http://redis.io/topics/replication:
...writes [to slaves] will be discarded if the slave and the master will [sic] resynchronize, or if the slave is restarted...
In fact, starting from v2.6, you can put slaves in slave-read-only mode which would prevent the mistake of writing data to a slave.
The documentation does go on to mention a potential use case for writing data to slaves:
...often there is ephemeral data that is unimportant that can be stored
into slaves. For instance clients may take information about
reachability of master in the slave instance to coordinate a fail over
strategy.