Real-time in-memory database vendor Redis announced a multi-year strategic collaboration agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Redis is an open-source, distributed NoSQL database and keeps data on disk, for persistence, promoting it to DRAM when needed. It can be used as a database, cache, streaming engine, or message broker. The company says that with Redis, when used as a database, applications can search through tens of millions of customer records to find information related to a single customer and get the results in real-time. The real time Redis Enterprise Cloud is a managed database-as-a-Service offering on AWS.
Jason Forget, Redis chief revenue officer and president, provided a statement: “While Redis has been working closely with AWS for years, we view this collaboration as a way to further customers’ desire to build and deploy at global scale with the local latency required by modern applications.”
“Modern applications” is code for cloud-native apps. Forget said: “Redis Enterprise Cloud on AWS allows developers to deploy and run modern applications with real-time, right now performance from anywhere on the planet.” That separates it from AWS’s own RedShift cloud data warehouse which does not have an in-memory capability. RedShift can use ACQUA Cache hardware acceleration modules but Redis is still faster.
Redis is also more than a database. A Redis search engine acts on a secondary index for data hosted in Redis, and can be used for real-time customer aggregations, consolidating data from other data stores for analytics. It can function as a fast full-text search or auto-complete engine. Redis on Flash (RoF) uses SSDs to extend the in-memory capacity by keeping the database’s keys and dictionary data structure in DRAM, and putting the the lesser-used portion of the dataset in local flash storage. This can save DRAM cost while providing near full-DRAM speed.
The Redis-AWS partnership is intended to deliver new product support, industry-specific offerings, and go-to-market strategies for Redis Enterprise Cloud, beginning with customers migrating on-premises open source or relational databases to the (AWS) cloud.
The two say their partnership will enable customers from the financial services, gaming, retail, and healthcare/life sciences industries to create highly available, geo-distributed applications with sub-millisecond performance; for example indexing and complex queries of frequently read data.
Ruba Borno, AWS VP Worldwide Channels and Alliances, said: “We are focused on … enabling businesses to utilize their data more effectively.”
Brazilian online food ordering and delivery platform iFood, which uses Redis to get its customers to spend more money, provided a quote for the announcement. Daniel Galinkin, its head of Machine Learning Engineering, said: “Our machine learning models deliver multiple recommendations during a single user session. We needed a high-performance database in order to handle these read and write operations that could be integrated with our machine learning platform, Amazon SageMaker. Redis Enterprise Cloud on AWS solves this issue very well for us.”
Redis is also available on the Azure cloud, complementing database services like Azure SQL Database and Azure Cosmos DB by enabling customer’s data tier to scale throughput at a lower cost than through increasing the number of database instances. GCP can also be used as cloud platform on which to run Redis.
As with other AWS-integrated apps, you can buy Redis Enterprise Cloud from the AWS Marketplace. It offers a consolidated bill that combines customer’s Redis Enterprise Cloud usage with their AWS consumption.
