How to run a redis cluster with Sentinel - redis

Since scaling and high availability are usually different concepts (Unless you opt for a load balancing fault tolerance scheme), I hoped Redis would support both. However to my understanding, we cant mix Redis cluster with Sentinel? If so how do I create a deployment which will have multiple partitions and is also managed by Sentinel?
Is there a guide that describes how this is done?

Redis' cluster does its own failover, hence Sentinel is unneeded when operating in cluster mode: http://redis.io/topics/cluster-spec#availability

Related

What is the difference between:Redis Replicated setup, Redis Cluster setup Redis Sentinel setup and Redis with Master with Slave only?[REDISSON]

I've read https://github.com/redisson/redisson
And I found out that there are several
Redis Replicated setup (including support of AWS ElastiCache and Azure Redis Cache)
Redis Cluster setup (including support of AWS ElastiCache Cluster and Azure Redis Cache)
Redis Sentinel setup
Redis with Master with Slave only
I am not a big expert in clusters and I don't understand the difference between these setups.
Could you beiefly explain the differences ?
Disclaimer I am an AWS employee.
I do not know how Redis Replicated Setup is different from Redis in Master-Slave mode. Maybe they mean cross-region replication?
In any case, I can try and explain setups I know about:
Redis with Master with Slave only - is a single shard setup where you create a primary replica together with one or more secondary (slave) replicas (let's hope PC police won't arrest me). This setup is used to improve the durability of your in-memory store. It's not advised to use your secondaries for reads because such setup has eventual consistency guarantees and your replica reads may be stale (depending on the replication lag).
Redis Cluster setup - the setup supported by cloud provides such as AWS Elasticache. In this setup your workload can be spread horizontally across multiple shards and each shard may have its own secondary replicas. Your client library must support this setup since it requires maintaining multiple connections to several nodes at a client level. Moreover, there are some locality rules you need to follow in order to use cluster mode efficiently:
Keys with foo{<shard>}bar notation will be routed to their shard according to what is stored inside curly brackets.
You can not use mset, mget and other multi-key commands across shards. You can still use these commands if their keys contain the same {shard} part.
There are additional cluster mode admin commands that are exposed by Redis but they are usually hijacked and hidden from users by cloud providers since cloud provides use them in order to manage redis cluster themselves.
Redis cluster have an ability to migrate part of your workload between shards. However, it still obliged to preserve correctness with respect to {shard} notation. Since your client library is responsible to fetch data from specific shard it must handle "moved" response when a shard might redirect it to another node.
Redis Sentinel setup - using an additional server that provides service discovery functionality for Redis clusters. Not strictly required and I believe is less popular across users. It serves as a single source of truth regarding each node's health and state. It provides monitoring, management, and service discovery functions for managing your Redis cluster. Many Redis client libraries provide the option of connecting to Redis sentinel nodes in order to achieve automatic service discovery and seamless failover flow. One of the reasons why this setup is less popular is because cloud companies like AWS Elasticache provide this service out of the box.

Redis advantages of Sentinel and Cluster

I'm planning to create a high available Redis Cluster. After reading many articles about building Redis cluster i'm confused. So what exactly are
the advantages of a Redis Sentinel Master1 Slave1 Slave2 Cluster? Is it more reliable as a Redis Multinode Sharded Cluster?
the advantages of a Redis Multinode Sharded Cluster? Is it more reliable as a Redis Sentinel Master1 Slave1 Slave2 Cluster?
Further questions to the Redis Sentinel Master1 Slave1 Slave2 Cluster:
when i have 1 Master and the two Slaves and traffic is getting higher and higher so this cluster will be to small how can i make the cluster bigger?
Further questions to the Redis Multinode Sharded Cluster:
why are there so many demos with running a cluster on a single instance but on different ports? That makes no sense to me.
when i have a cluster with 4 masters and 4 replicas, how can an application or a client be sure to write to the cluster? When Master1 and Slave1 are dying but my application is writing always to the IP of Master1 then it will not work anymore. Which solutions are out there to implement a sharded cluster well to make it available for applications to find it with a single ip and port? Keepalived? HAproxy?
when i juse for a 4 master setup with e.g. Keepalived - doesn't that cancel out the different masters?
furthermore i need to understand why the multinode cluster is only for solutions where more data will need to be written as memory is available. Why? For me a multi master setup sounds good to be scaleable.
is it right that the the sharded cluster setup does not support multikey operations when the cluster is not in caching mode?
I'm unsure if these two solutions are the only ones. Hopefully you guys can help me to understand the architectures of Redis. Sorry for so many questions.
I will try to answer some of your questions but first let me describe the different deployment options of Redis.
Redis has three basic deployments: single node, sentinel and cluster.
Single node - The basic solution where you run single process running Redis.
It is not scalable and not highly available.
Redis Sentinel - Deployment that consist of multiple nodes where one is elected as master and the rest are slaves.
It adds high availability since in case of master failure one of the slaves will be automatically promoted to master.
It is not scalable since the master node is the only node that can write data.
You can configure the clients to direct read requests to the slaves, which will take some of the load from the master. However, in this case slaves might return stale data since they replicate the master asynchronously.
Redis Cluster - Deployment that consist of at least 6 nodes (3 masters and 3 slaves). where data is sharded between the masters. It is highly available since in case of master failure, one of his slaves will automatically be promoted to master. It is scalable since you can add more nodes and reshard the data so that the new nodes will take some of the load.
So to answer your questions:
The advantages of Sentinel over Redis Cluster are:
Hardware - You can setup fully working Sentinel deployment with three nodes. Redis Cluster requires at least six nodes.
Simplicity - usually it is easier to maintain and configure.
The advantages of Redis Cluster over Sentinel is that it is scalable.
The decision between that two deployment should be based on your expected load.
If your write load can be managed with a single Redis master node, you can go with Sentinel deployment.
If one node cannot handle your expected load, you must go with Cluster deployment.
Redis Sentinel deployment is not scalable so making the cluster bigger will not improve your performance. The only exception is that adding slaves can improve your read performance (in case you direct read requests to the slaves).
Redis Cluster running on a single node with multiple ports is only for development and demo purposes. In production it is useless.
In Redis Cluster deployment clients should have network access to all nodes (and node only Master1). This is because data is sharded between the masters.
In case client try to write data to Master1 but Master2 is the owner of the data, Master1 will return a MOVE message to the client, guiding it to send the request to Master2.
You cannot have a single HAProxy in front of all Redis nodes.
Same answer as in 5, in the cluster deployment clients should have direct connection to all masters and slaves not through LB or Keepalived.
Not sure I totally understood your question but Redis Cluster is the only solution for Redis that is scalable.
Redis Cluster deployment support multikey operations only when all keys are in the same node. You can use "hash tags" to force multiple keys to be handled by the same master.
Some good links that can help you understand it better:
Description on the different Redis deployment options: https://blog.octo.com/en/what-redis-deployment-do-you-need
Detailed explanation on the architecture of Redis Cluster: https://blog.usejournal.com/first-step-to-redis-cluster-7712e1c31847

HA redis solution,cluster or Sentinel

I need an HA redis solution instead of a single instance. Should I use cluster or Sentinel? I have tried to find out the difference between them, there is no official document about this, thanks a lot.
Well, for a HA redis solution , it depends upon the number of nodes you want to configure.
According to offical Redis documentation on Redis-cluster and Redis-sentinel both provides HA Solution but.....
Redis Sentinel provides high availability for Redis. In practical terms this means that using Sentinel you can create a Redis deployment that resists without human intervention to certain kind of failures.
Redis Cluster provides a way to run a Redis installation where data is automatically sharded across multiple Redis nodes.
Redis Cluster also provides some degree of availability during partitions, that is in practical terms the ability to continue the operations when some nodes fail or are not able to communicate. However the cluster stops to operate in the event of larger failures (for example when the majority of masters are unavailable).
For more information please refer the official docs :)
Cheers

Redis mirror datacenter for active-active (xdcr feature)

Newbie to redis here so please bear with me.
I am looking for a method to have dual datacenter in active-active configuration. My need here is that:
if a datacenter goes down the other datacenter should not need any intervention to carry on working
Networking issues, if they occur, should not prevent one or the other datacenter to fail on set/get redis calls.
Restarting failed datacenter should have a means mirror the working redis' data back before going active
I have been reading up on replication abilities of redis, what I understand is there is
master-slave(s) replication
A cluster can have masters that are sharded
But what I haven't seen is a cluster replicating to another cluster.
Question:
Is there a architecture design where all redis in one dc replicate with the other? (Looks like couchbase appears to have this)
I do see a keyspace notifier which can be used in a pub/sub, what i want to know is whether I can use it to pub/sub redis to redis from one dc to the other to act as replication.

Is automatic failover built into Redis 2.8?

I am planning on adding Redis to our application as a session and cache store. I have been looking at how to make Redis highly available on an on-premise hosted solution.
The standard approach appears to be to set up Redis as a 3 node replica and use Sentinel for the monitoring and automatic failover.
Redis 2.8 introduces Redis cluster. Does that mean it brings in automatic failover etc and we no longer need to use Sentinel?
No, Cluster and Failover are different scenarios. Also Cluster is in 3.0, not 2.8.
The standard (and minimum) setup for HA is a master and one slave (aka "a pod"), with a separate set of three nodes which run Sentinel and monitor the pod.
This is to ensure failover of the server. However, either your client library has to support using Sentinel to discover master and reconnect on failure, you implement it in your code, or you set up a TCP load balancer and a sentinel monitoring daemon to update your load balancer configuration when a failover occurs at which point the client code doesn't know or care about sentinel.
Cluster isn't there to provide HA, it is there for server-side sharding of data. For Cluster you're looking at 6-7 nodes minimum (3 master, 3 slave, 1 spare) as well as Cluster support in the client and restrictions about commands and Lua script which need to access multiple keys.