10

As you may have noticed Amazon has announced a new feature for its own ElasticCache product, which is supporting Redis.

We are currently using one EC2 instance for our Redis (just queuing for now) and we've decided to use Redis for other upcoming features such as commenting system, discussion, real-time messaging, real-time user tracking and analytics, etc.

We don't mind to run more and bigger EC2 instances, but should we invest in ElasticCache (Redis) and move into it from the beginning now that we haven't started yet or it's too soon to see the results, benchmarks, and downside? Or it's even limited in some prospectives compare to having your own Redis on your own instances?

Update 1:

Let me to be detailed of what we are going to do with Redis. Probably using queuing as we have been doing it by Resque. Not sure if ElasticCache let us do any Pub/Sub but if it does we would like to do that as well. And of course atomic and high-level operations.

Update2:

There is a new video by Senior Product Manger of Amazon Elastic Cache posted a week ago that happened during AWS reInvent Conference. Because it is new he talks about Redis too!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odMmdPBV8hM

Maziyar
  • 1,813
  • 2
  • 17
  • 36
  • I haven't even read my question for spelling check, what's with the down vote and close vote? Although everyone is entitled to their own opinion, I just expect you to say why you gave negative vote to this question. It's not duplicated and it's a new feature that just being released. Thanks! – Maziyar Sep 09 '13 at 11:05
  • 1
    No one comments on their down votes because it opens them up to retaliatory down votes. That said, straight from your comments and the close reason: you're looking for opinions. – LittleBobbyTables - Au Revoir Sep 09 '13 at 11:24
  • 1
    Respectfully disagree. When you down vote a Q the Stack overflow asks you to please leave a comment as a constructive criticism. Maybe a detail missing or something is not right and I can edit it out. I didn't ask a question for a minus or a plus. I am looking for opinion that answers the question. I'm sure you understand that. Didn't question the act just wanted to know if I could improve the question in order to get better answers. – Maziyar Sep 09 '13 at 12:04
  • 2
    Try rewording as `Is Amazon EC Redis an effective caching solution or not?` – raffian Sep 10 '13 at 16:35
  • @raffian I edited out the title, yours is way better. Thanks. – Maziyar Sep 11 '13 at 13:25
  • @LittleBobbyTables If down-vote retaliation worries you, you're doing something wrong. Constructive criticism is usually respected on SO, it's not a deceleration of war between members, at least that's been my experience. – raffian Sep 11 '13 at 13:31
  • @raffian - then your experience and my experience differ; after being the recipient of numerous retaliation downvotes (with some users even admitting to doing so), I can see why people don't comment on downvotes. This is waaaay off-topic, though; if you want to continue this, feel free to start a chat. – LittleBobbyTables - Au Revoir Sep 11 '13 at 13:34

1 Answers1

7

I would say that if Redis is an effective caching solution for you, then ElasticCache will work for you - you're simply paying AWS to manage the back end and plumbing for you. Performance may be marginally slower - you have to have a DNS lookup for requests, vs having redis running in a VPC where you can access a private IP address directly - but even accessing it from an EC2 instance should resolve the public DNS name to the internal private IP. And of course you can launch your EC node in your VPC.

There are some complications when running a memcached cluster - you will need to use the amazon client to make sure your code connects to the correct node - but I do not believe as of Dec 2013 that this is needed for redis.

If you're implementing a queue on top of redis, have you looked at SQS to see if it will work for you?

chris
  • 33,326
  • 50
  • 148
  • 232
  • Hi Chris. I've looked at the SQS but the company is really restricted about the technologies because of the manpower. They don't want to add anything extra that leads to hiring people or educating existing ones. That's the real reason why they use Redis as a primary database instead of something like MongoDB. I heard doing few things in Redis ElasticCache is not strait-forward like backing up. Is this a logical argument to say using ElasticCache or RDS will reduce the number of staff and people who need to maintain the services? – Maziyar Dec 09 '13 at 14:39
  • 2
    @Maziyar: No doubt that there is a learning curve with each new AWS product you introduce to your environment. However, the attitude your company has is extremely short-sighted: the reason the different AWS solutions succeed is because over the longer term, they reduce costs and provide cheaper, more reliable infrastructure. AWS can automate and maintain their services easier and cheaper than you can ever hope to. – chris Dec 09 '13 at 15:33