Redis - Tomcat Session Manager : Read from Slave - redis

I am using redis(Redis 3.1) as session store for tomcat(Tomcat 7). To ensure high availability, there is a sentinel setup and two instances(master and slave) of redis server. The slave is configured as read-only. After running few tests and verifying the statistics, it's observerd there are no read requests sent to the slave. All the read requests are processed by the master alone.
Could you please let me know how I can make the slave serve the read requests?

You could use Redis based Tomcat Session Manager provided by Redisson. It allows to manage which type of node use for read operation (master, slave or both master and slave). Perfectly works in Sentinel/Cluster modes.

Related

Does it require to put load balancer before Redis cluster

I am using Redis Cluster on 3 Linux servers (CentOS 7). I have standard configuration i.e. 6 nodes, 3 master instances, and 3 slave instances (one master have one slave) distributed on these 3 Linux servers. I am using this setup for my web application for data caching, HTTP response caching. My aim is to read primary and write secondary i.e. Read operation should not fail or delayed.
Now I would like to ask is it necessary to configure any load balancer before by 3 Linux servers so that my web application requests to Redis cluster instances can be distributed properly on these Redis servers? Or Redis cluster itself able to handle the load distribution?
If Yes, then please mention any reference link to configure the same. I have checked official documentation Redis Cluster but it does not specify anything regarding load balancer setup.
If you're running Redis in "Cluster Mode" you don't need a load balancer. Your Redis client (assuming it's any good) should contact Redis for a list of which slots are on which nodes when your application starts up. It will hash keys locally (in your application) and send requests directly to the node which owns the slot for that key (which avoids the extra call to Redis which results in a MOVED response).
You should be able to configure your client to do reads on slave and writes on master - or to do both reads and writes on only masters. In addition to configuring your client, if you want to do reads on slaves, check out the READONLY command: https://redis.io/commands/readonly .

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.

Failing over with single Replication Group on ElastiCache Redis

I'm testing out ElastiCache backed by Redis with the following specs:
Using Redis 2.8, with Multi-AZ
Single replication group
1 master node in us-east-1b, 1 slave node in us-east-1c, 1 slave node in us-east-1d
The part of the application writing is directly using the endpoint for the master node (primary-node.use1.cache.amazonaws.com)
The part of the application doing only reads is pointing to a custom endpoint (readonly.redis.mydomain.com) configured in HAProxy, which then points to the two other read slave end points. (readslave1.use1.cache.amazonaws.com and readslave2.use1.cache.amazonaws.com)
Now lets say the primary node (master) fails in us-east-1b.
From what I understand, if the master instance fails, I won't have to change the url for the end point for writing to Redis (primary-node.use1.cache.amazonaws.com), although from there, I still have the following questions:
Do I have to change the endpoint names for the read only slaves?
How long until the missing slave is added into the pool?
If there's anything else I'm missing, I'd appreciate the advice/information.
Thanks!
If you are using ElastiCache, you should make use the "Primary EndpointThe" provided by AWS.
That endpoint actually is backed by Route53, if the primary (master) redis is down, since you enable MutliA-Z, it will auto fail over to one of the read replica (slave).
In that case, you don't need to modify the endpoint of your redis.
I don't know why you have such design, seems you only want write to master, but always read from slave.
For HA Proxy part, you should include TCP check for ALL 3 redis nodes, using their "Read Endpoint"
In haproxy, you can check if the endpoint is SLAVE, if yes, your haproxy should redirect the traffic to that.
Notice that in the application layer, if your redis driver don't support auto reconnect, your script will fail to connect to the new master nodes.
In addition to "auto reconnect", since AWS is using Route53 DNS to do fail over, some lib will NOT do NS lookup again, which means the DNS is still pointing to the OLD ip which is the old master.
Using HAproxy can solve this problem.

Redis failover scenario

currently I have a redis instance, now I would make it more failure prove.
Is it possible to archive the following things?
I connect to redis with the service stack library, now I want that when the server is not available redis switch to the failover server automatically.
You should configure a Redis instance as a slave of your master instance, either using the slaveof command or more likely by adding a slaveof directive in the configuration file (something like 'slaveof 127.0.0.1 6380' ; look at the documentation for more info); then use Redis Sentinel to monitor the instances and promote the Slave as Master when the master fails.
Moreover you either have to use a Redis client that supports sentinel and handles the redirection when the slave is promoted to slave, or use a network configuration (like virtual IP) to make the redirection transparent for your application.

Redis DB Master Slave set up

I have installed Redis for my nodeJS application and configured it to be a slave for another instance of Redis DB running on a different server. Can I have the same instance (different DB) of Redis (running as slave) act as Master for locally installed application?
Thanks in advance
Yes, you can, but with a big caveat.
Any slave instance can be master of one or several other instances. So you can imagine daisy chaining slaves and build a hierarchical replication system.
Now, my understanding is you don't need your slave to feed another Redis instance, but just allow an application to perform read/write operations in another database of the slave instance.
To allow it, you need to set the value of the slave-read-only parameter to "no" in the slave configuration:
# You can configure a slave instance to accept writes or not. Writing against
# a slave instance may be useful to store some ephemeral data (because data
# written on a slave will be easily deleted after resync with the master) but
# may also cause problems if clients are writing to it because of a
# misconfiguration.
#
# Since Redis 2.6 by default slaves are read-only.
#
# Note: read only slaves are not designed to be exposed to untrusted clients
# on the internet. It's just a protection layer against misuse of the instance.
# Still a read only slave exports by default all the administrative commands
# such as CONFIG, DEBUG, and so forth. To a limited extend you can improve
# security of read only slaves using 'rename-command' to shadow all the
# administrative / dangerous commands.
slave-read-only no
Now, all the write operations you will run on this instance will be ephemeral. If the link is lost between the master and the slave, the slave will completely synchronize again to the master. All the data you have set on the slave will be lost. If you stop and restart the slave, you will also loose all the ephemeral data.
It may or may not suit your needs.
There is no way to parameter the synchronization (or the persistence options) at the database level. You cannot tell Redis to synchronize a given database, and not another one. Configuration always applies at the instance level.