The other day my development team's Solutions Architect came to me and asked me to deploy Ubuntu based Redis servers in our QA environment so that the developers could test using Redis for session state instead of logging to a Microsoft SQL database. This was their solution to poor performance issues in our applications. Apparently the session state transactions were causing a bottleneck in Microsoft SQL.
Anyway, I had never heard of Redis so I found this video on YouTube that explains what Redis is and why you might want to use Redis:
Also shown in the video, here is a description of what Redis is from their website:
Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache and message broker. It supports data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs and geospatial indexes with radius queries. Redis has built-in replication, Lua scripting, LRU eviction, transactions and different levels of on-disk persistence, and provides high availability via Redis Sentinel and automatic partitioning with Redis Cluster.You might be wondering how to install Redis in Ubuntu. I'm glad you asked, because Redis is available in the Ubuntu repositories, so installation is as simple as running:
- sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install redis-server
Do you use Redis in your environment? If so, what are you using it for? Let us know in the comments!