we have a small project, and we want to start using a non-clustered version of either keydb or redis. I've read a lot of reviews. I would like to hear more. Which system will be easier to turn into a cluster in the future, and maybe transfer to kubernetes?
Regarding scaling/simplicity, I would point out both Redis and KeyDB are able to turn into sharded clusters, or add replica nodes, KeyDB also offers active replication (some limits, but avoids sentinel). Both are also compatible with RESP protocol so can use any Redis client.
A few points relevant to both KeyDB and Redis when trying to simplify scaling in the future (ie. moving to a sharded data set):
Ensure you use a client that is compatible with cluster-mode enabled as not all are
Be careful of how you use transactions. If you rely heavily on transactions that hit multiple keys, you may need to rethink this when spreading data across multiple shards.
The point above also applies to certain commands that can hit multiple shards such as SCAN, KEYS, batch requests (ie. MGET), SUNION, etc. Planning how you structure your data may make this easier when you decide to scale up.
Aerospike is a key store database with support for persistence.
But can I trust this persistence enough to use it as an database altogether?
As I understand it writes data to memory first and then persist it.
I can live with eventual consistency, but I don't want to be in a state where something was committed but due to machine failure it never got written down to the disk and hence can never be retrieved.
I tried looking at the various use cases but I was just curious about this one.
Also what guarantee does client.put provides as far as saving of a new record is concerned.
Aerospike provides a user configurable replication factor. Most people use 2, if you are really concerned, you can use 3 or even more. Size the cluster accordingly. For RF=3, put returns when 3 nodes have written data to the their write-block in memory which is asynchronously flushed to persistent layer. So it depends on what node failure pattern you are trying protect against. If you are worried about entire cluster crashing instantly, then you may have a case for 1 second (default) worth of lost data. The one second can be configured lower as well. Aerospike also provides rack aware configuration which protects against data loss if entire rack goes down. The put goes to nodes in different racks always. Finally Aerospike provides cross data center replication - its asynchronous but does give an option to replicate your data across geo. Of course, going across geo does have its latency. Finally, if you are totally concerned about entire cluster shutdown, you can connect to two separate clusters in your application and always push updates to two separate clusters. Of course, you must now worry about consistency if application fails between two writes. I don't know of anyone who had to resort to that.
I have a very large set of keys, 200M keys, with small values, <100 bytes, to store and I'm trying to use Redis. The problem is such that I have 10 Redis DB to split the keys over, but currently I'm on a single server with those 10 Redis DB. By a Redis DB I mean using SELECT. From my calculations it looks like I'm going to blow out memory. I think I'll need over 4TB of memory for this case! What are my options? First, my calculation is based on 10000 keys with 100 byte values taking 220MB of RAM (this is from a table I found). So simply put (2*10^8 / 10^4) * 220MB = 4.4TB.
If my calculation looks correct, what are my options? I've read on different posts that Redis VM is no longer an option. Can I use a Redis cluster? This still appears to require too many servers to be practical. I understand I could switch to another DB, but I'd like that to be the last resort option.
Firstly, using shared databases (i.e. the SELECT command) isn't a recommended practice since all of these databases are essentially managed by the same Redis process. It is preferable having 10 separate Redis processes (even on the same server) in order to avoid contention (more info here).
Next, there are ways to reduce the memory footprint of your database. You could, for example, perform client-side compression (see here) or consider other optimizations such as using Hashes to keep multiple values (as described here).
That said, a Redis server is ultimately bound by the amount of RAM that the host provides. Once you've reached that limit you'll need to shard your database and use a Redis cluster. Since you're already using multiple databases this shouldn't pose a big challenge as your code should already be compatible with that to a degree. Sharding can be done in one of three approaches: client, proxy or Redis Cluster. Client-side sharding can be implemented in your code or by the Redis client that you're using (if the client library that you're using supports that). Redis Cluster (v3) is expected to be released in the very near future and already has a stable release candidate. As for proxy-based sharding, there are several open source solutions out there, including Twitter's twemproxy, Netflix's dynomite and codis. Additional information about sharding and partitioning can be found here.
Disclaimer: I work at Redis Labs. Lastly, AFAIK there's only one Redis-as-a-Service provider that already provides built-in support for clustering Redis. Redis Labs' Redis Cloud is a fully-managed service that can scale seamlessly to any required capacity. Our clusters support both the '{}' hashtag standard as well as sharding by RegEx - more about this can be found here.
You can use LMDB with Dynomite to store data beyond your memory capacity. LMDB uses both disk and memory to store data. Dynomite make LMDB to be distributed.
We have done a POC with this combo and they work nicely together.
For more information, please check out our open issue here:
https://github.com/Netflix/dynomite/issues/254
I understand that Redis serves all data from memory, but does it persist as well across server reboot so that when the server reboots it reads into memory all the data from disk. Or is it always a blank store which is only to store data while apps are running with no persistence?
I suggest you read about this on http://redis.io/topics/persistence . Basically you lose the guaranteed persistence when you increase performance by using only in-memory storing. Imagine a scenario where you INSERT into memory, but before it gets persisted to disk lose power. There will be data loss.
Redis supports so-called "snapshots". This means that it will do a complete copy of whats in memory at some points in time (e.g. every full hour). When you lose power between two snapshots, you will lose the data from the time between the last snapshot and the crash (doesn't have to be a power outage..). Redis trades data safety versus performance, like most NoSQL-DBs do.
Most NoSQL-databases follow a concept of replication among multiple nodes to minimize this risk. Redis is considered more a speedy cache instead of a database that guarantees data consistency. Therefore its use cases typically differ from those of real databases:
You can, for example, store sessions, performance counters or whatever in it with unmatched performance and no real loss in case of a crash. But processing orders/purchase histories and so on is considered a job for traditional databases.
Redis server saves all its data to HDD from time to time, thus providing some level of persistence.
It saves data in one of the following cases:
automatically from time to time
when you manually call BGSAVE command
when redis is shutting down
But data in redis is not really persistent, because:
crash of redis process means losing all changes since last save
BGSAVE operation can only be performed if you have enough free RAM (the amount of extra RAM is equal to the size of redis DB)
N.B.: BGSAVE RAM requirement is a real problem, because redis continues to work up until there is no more RAM to run in, but it stops saving data to HDD much earlier (at approx. 50% of RAM).
For more information see Redis Persistence.
It is a matter of configuration. You can have none, partial or full persistence of your data on Redis. The best decision will be driven by the project's technical and business needs.
According to the Redis documentation about persistence you can set up your instance to save data into disk from time to time or on each query, in a nutshell. They provide two strategies/methods AOF and RDB (read the documentation to see details about then), you can use each one alone or together.
If you want a "SQL like persistence", they have said:
The general indication is that you should use both persistence methods if you want a degree of data safety comparable to what PostgreSQL can provide you.
The answer is generally yes, however a fuller answer really depends on what type of data you're trying to store. In general, the more complete short answer is:
Redis isn't the best fit for persistent storage as it's mainly performance focused
Redis is really more suitable for reliable in-memory storage/cacheing of current state data, particularly for allowing scalability by providing a central source for data used across multiple clients/servers
Having said this, by default Redis will persist data snapshots at a periodic interval (apparently this is every 1 minute, but I haven't verified this - this is described by the article below, which is a good basic intro):
http://qnimate.com/redis-permanent-storage/
TL;DR
From the official docs:
RDB persistence [the default] performs point-in-time snapshots of your dataset at specified intervals.
AOF persistence [needs to be explicitly configured] logs every write operation received by the server, that will be played again at server startup, reconstructing the
original dataset.
Redis must be explicitly configured for AOF persistence, if this is required, and this will result in a performance penalty as well as growing logs. It may suffice for relatively reliable persistence of a limited amount of data flow.
You can choose no persistence at all.Better performance but all the data lose when Redis shutting down.
Redis has two persistence mechanisms: RDB and AOF.RDB uses a scheduler global snapshooting and AOF writes update to an apappend-only log file similar to MySql.
You can use one of them or both.When Redis reboots,it constructes data from reading the RDB file or AOF file.
All the answers in this thread are talking about the possibility of redis to persist the data: https://redis.io/topics/persistence (Using AOF + after every write (change)).
It's a great link to get you started, but it is defenently not showing you the full picture.
Can/Should You Really Persist Unrecoverable Data/State On Redis?
Redis docs does not talk about:
Which redis providers support this (AOF + after every write) option:
Almost none of them - redis labs on the cloud does NOT provide this option. You may need to buy the on-premise version of redis-labs to support it. As not all companies are willing to go on-premise, then they will have a problem.
Other Redis Providers does not specify if they support this option at all. AWS Cache, Aiven,...
AOF + after every write - This option is slow. you will have to test it your self on your production hardware to see if it fits your requirements.
Redis enterpice provide this option and from this link: https://redislabs.com/blog/your-cloud-cant-do-that-0-5m-ops-acid-1msec-latency/ let's see some banchmarks:
1x x1.16xlarge instance on AWS - They could not achieve less than 2ms latency:
where latency was measured from the time the first byte of the request arrived at the cluster until the first byte of the ‘write’ response was sent back to the client
They had additional banchmarking on a much better harddisk (Dell-EMC VMAX) which results < 1ms operation latency (!!) and from 70K ops/sec (write intensive test) to 660K ops/sec (read intensive test). Pretty impresive!!!
But it defenetly required a (very) skilled devops to help you create this infrastructure and maintain it over time.
One could (falsy) argue that if you have a cluster of redis nodes (with replicas), now you have full persistency. this is false claim:
All DBs (sql,non-sql,redis,...) have the same problem - For example, running set x 1 on node1, how much time it takes for this (or any) change to be made in all the other nodes. So additional reads will receive the same output. well, it depends on alot of fuctors and configurations.
It is a nightmare to deal with inconsistency of a value of a key in multiple nodes (any DB type). You can read more about it from Redis Author (antirez): http://antirez.com/news/66. Here is a short example of the actual ngihtmare of storing a state in redis (+ a solution - WAIT command to know how much other redis nodes received the latest change change):
def save_payment(payment_id)
redis.rpush(payment_id,”in progress”) # Return false on exception
if redis.wait(3,1000) >= 3 then
redis.rpush(payment_id,”confirmed”) # Return false on exception
if redis.wait(3,1000) >= 3 then
return true
else
redis.rpush(payment_id,”cancelled”)
return false
end
else
return false
end
The above example is not suffeint and has a real problem of knowing in advance how much nodes there actually are (and alive) at every moment.
Other DBs will have the same problem as well. Maybe they have better APIs but the problem still exists.
As far as I know, alot of applications are not even aware of this problem.
All in all, picking more dbs nodes is not a one click configuration. It involves alot more.
To conclude this research, what to do depends on:
How much devs your team has (so this task won't slow you down)?
Do you have a skilled devops?
What is the distributed-system skills in your team?
Money to buy hardware?
Time to invest in the solution?
And probably more...
Many Not well-informed and relatively new users think that Redis is a cache only and NOT an ideal choice for Reliable Persistence.
The reality is that the lines between DB, Cache (and many more types) are blurred nowadays.
It's all configurable and as users/engineers we have choices to configure it as a cache, as a DB (and even as a hybrid).
Each choice comes with benefits and costs. And this is NOT an exception for Redis but all well-known Distributed systems provide options to configure different aspects (Persistence, Availability, Consistency, etc). So, if you configure Redis in default mode hoping that it will magically give you highly reliable persistence then it's team/engineer fault (and NOT that of Redis).
I have discussed these aspects in more detail on my blog here.
Also, here is a link from Redis itself.
I'm reading about production topology for the Analytics part of Worklight 6.2.
https://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/api/content/SSZH4A_6.2.0/com.ibm.worklight.monitor.doc/monitor/t_setting_up_production_cluster.html
It explains that nodes can act both as Master Node or as Data Node or only as one of them.
My question is why we should configure dedicated nodes, Master OR Data instead of configuring all the nodes for both Master AND Data.
I assume the the node (only one) acting as master will provide worst performance in its Data role but on the other hand the configuration will be simpler and the high availability will be higher.
Thank you.
Your assumption is correct.
A master node is responsible for handling communication between the data nodes. The data nodes will be responsible for indexing data. Having dedicated master and data nodes will allow them to focus their processing time and memory on their specific tasks. However, as you mentioned, in some cases its not worth doing this to complicate the configuration.
Another reason is that its not necessary to put a master node on a high performing machine. You can reserve the better machines for the data nodes.
The analytics console uses Elasticsearch under the covers. It would be worth looking up the benefits and drawbacks of choosing master and data nodes in Elasticsearch since it is an open source library and there are several resources available for it.
Edit:
As you can imagine, there is no one size fits all configuration. The configuration depends on several factors such as:
How long you wish to keep data stored
How many machines you have to dedicate to analytics
How verbose your client logs have been set
Your preferences between availability and performance
In my personal tests, I typically keep each node as a data and master node. Its possible that in the future we will document how the different configurations affect performance.