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.
Related
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.
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
I have a basic question about Redis connection parameters from CacheManager.NET perspective. In case when we have Redis cluster with a master and 2 slaves, and with quorum of sentinel processes, should we provide the IP:PORT combinations pointing to the sentinel processes OR the actual Redis server processes.
As suggested in https://seanmcgary.com/posts/how-to-build-a-fault-tolerant-redis-cluster-with-sentinel, it is advisable to ask the sentinel process about the actual master before making the connection. And probably that goes in line with Jedis which provides JedisSentinelPool to do the initial lookup.
Essentially what we want is that the load balancing on reads (via CacheManager.NET) and the writes should go to the current master node of the cluster.
CacheManager relies on StackExchange.Redis for the Redis implementation. Therefor, whatever this client library supports, CacheManager does, too.
Unfortunately, sentinel support is not implemented, there are issues on github for years regarding that
That being said, I did some testing with a Multi Master/Slave + Sentinel setup. Added all the non-sentinel nodes as endpoints to the Multiplexer configuration and it kinda works because the Redis Client knows how to handle multiple master/slave instances.
In the process of switching to another master, the client might throw exceptions that it cannot write to a readonly slave and such. CacheManager might retry those calls and after a short amount of time, when the leader election is done, the call should go through.
But this is not 100% stable and I would not put that in production, as "official" support is still missing...
Alternative to running with sentinels, you could run Redis in Cluster mode which should just work, or behind a proxy which deals with all that master/slave stuff.
Twemproxy is one alternative.
I still have to add support for Twemproxy to CacheManager, as many features are simply not available, like Lua scripting or get a list of servers or flush commands...
This will come in 1.0.2
Hope that helps.
I have a question. Suppose I am using a Redis cluster with 3 shards (with master and slave). I came to know that if a master and its slave fails at the same time Redis Cluster is not able to continue to operate. What happen after that.
Would Redis cluster delete all the other keys from other 2 nodes as well? (When it comes back)
Do we need to manually restart this cluster and can we somehow retain the other keys values (on other nodes)?
How will it behave if I use Azure Redis Cache?
Thanks In Advance
1. Would Redis cluster delete all the other keys from other 2 nodes as well? (When it comes back)
First of all only the operations are blocked not the cluster activity and nothing is done with the data so says the documentation
Redis Cluster failure detection is used to recognize when a master or slave node is no longer reachable by the majority of nodes and then respond by promoting a slave to the role of master. When slave promotion is not possible the cluster is put in an error state to stop receiving queries from clients.
Next regarding if the data gets deleted or not (Under Replication document)
In setups where Redis replication is used, it is strongly advised to have persistence turned on in the master
Which means that only if the persistence was turned off and the master server pair went down then you will loose the data. When the pair comes back up, you will not be able to recover the data. So keep Redis persistence turned on.
2. Do we need to manually restart this cluster and can we somehow retain the other keys values (on other nodes)?
I think the above answer covers it up.
3. How will it behave if I use Azure Redis Cache?
From Azure Redis Cache FAQ
High Availability/SLA: Azure Redis Cache guarantees that a Standard/Premium cache will be available at least 99.9% of the time. To learn more about our SLA, see Azure Redis Cache Pricing. The SLA only covers connectivity to the Cache endpoints. The SLA does not cover protection from data loss. We recommend using the Redis data persistence feature in the Premium tier to increase resiliency against data loss.
So it's kinda their headache
OR
Redis Cluster: If you want to create caches larger than 53 GB or want to shard data across multiple Redis nodes, you can use Redis clustering which is available in the Premium tier. Each node consists of a primary/replica cache pair for high availability. For more information, see How to configure clustering for a Premium Azure Redis Cache.
The Spring XD documentation (http://docs.spring.io/spring-xd/docs/1.0.0.RC1/reference/html/) recommends Zookeeper to be run in ensemble so that Zookeeper is highly available. There is not lot of details about Redis about high availability.
If I were to run 2 XD admin instances and say 4 Container instances, I see 3 options
should I run a Redis instance in each server that runs container or admin? In that case does the Distributed runtime work properly with different Redis instances handling transport of different modules?
OR
should I run 1 Redis instance in a separate server and configure all XD instances to talk to this instance? In this case 1 instance of Redis is not highly available
OR
should I configure Redis cluster or Redis Sentinel high availability? I am not sure how XD or any other client will connect to a cluster or HA.
Thanks
I would suggest that you run a single Redis instance, there are some settings for persistence that you can change that may meet your requirements.
http://redis.io/topics/persistence
We will be adding support for Redis Sentinal, certainly in the Spring XD 1.1 release, but possibly in a maintenance release depending on what library changes we need to pick up. Spring Data Redis and Spring Boot have recent updates to support Redis Sentinal.
If you are using Redis as a message transport and want higher guarantees, I would switch to using Rabbit HA configuration of the MessageBus.
Cheers,
Mark