Redis Enterprise for Microservices Architecture

Accelerate innovation with a real-time data layer for your microservices architecture

Microservices architectures make it possible to launch new products faster, support greater scale, and be more responsive to customer demands. With multiple modern data models, fault tolerance in any scenario, and the flexibility to deploy across multiple environments, Redis Enterprise enables developers and operators to optimize their data layer for a microservices architecture.

What is a microservices architecture?

In a monolithic architecture, processes are tightly coupled and run as a single deployable artifact. While this is relatively simple to begin with, scaling up or modifying one part of your application requires updating the entire service, resulting in inefficient scalability and increased complexity as your codebase grows in size.

Microservices architecture involves a collection of loosely coupled services that can be independently updated and scaled by smaller teams. Because individual services are easier to build and manage than a single monolithic application, microservices enables more frequent deployments, data store autonomy, and increased flexibility.

Organizations are transitioning their applications to microservices architecture in order to drastically decrease time to market, more easily adopt new technologies, and respond faster to customer needs.

Why Redis Enterprise is a perfect fit for microservices

Performance at microservices scale

In a microservices environment, services that need to run in real-time must compensate for networking overhead. Redis Enterprise delivers sub-millisecond latency for all Redis data types and modules, as well as the ability to scale instantly and linearly to almost any throughput needed.

Designed for fault tolerance and resilience

To ensure your applications are resilient to failure in any scenario, Redis Enterprise uses a shared-nothing cluster architecture and is fault tolerant at all levels: with automated failover at the process level, for individual nodes, and even across infrastructure availability zones, as well as tunable persistence and disaster recovery.

Fast and flexible data models

Redis Enterprise allows developers to choose the data model best suited to the performance and data access requirements for their microservices architecture, while retaining a unified operational interface that reduces technology sprawl, simplifies operations, and reduces service latency.

Adaptable across clouds and geographies

Microservices provide a great deal of technology flexibility, and choosing where you want to run your database should be no exception. Redis Enterprise can be deployed anywhere—on any cloud platform, on-premises, or in a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud architecture.

Ways to use Redis Enterprise in your microservices architecture

As a database for services needing real-time performance

In a microservices architecture, choosing a database that is optimized for the data modeling and performance requirements of each service is critical. Redis Enterprise provides multiple data models that run in-memory so that developers can choose the right data model for each service without sacrificing performance.

Inter-service communication and event sourcing

Ensuring that services can properly communicate state, events, and data between each other can be a significant challenge in a microservices environment. Redis Enterprise can be used to manage inter-service communication, or act as an event store with Redis Streams.

Session and authentication management

Storing user session data enables applications to remember user identity, login credentials, personalized information, recent actions, and more—all while making sure that application response times are as fast as possible. Redis Enterprise makes session management fast with support for extremely large datasets using Redis on Flash and data-persistence that don’t impact performance.

“Since Redis and microservices [removed] the constraints of our old architecture, it [increased] our speed of deployment 2x – 3x within the first year.”

Paul Kurmas

Director of Strategic Product Development, Mutualink

Product features

Active-Active replication

A microservices architecture has many connected services, yet faces the same performance demands as other approaches. To minimize latency, data should reside as close to the services as possible. Ensuring databases are consistent with one another in the event of failures or conflicting updates can also be challenging. Redis Enterprise can be deployed as an Active-Active, conflict-free replicated database to handle updates from multiple local installations of your services without compromising latency or data consistency, and providing continuity in the event of failures.

Multiple data models

Redis Enterprise allows developers to choose the data model best suited to the performance and data-access requirements of individual microservices, while retaining a unified operational interface that reduces technology sprawl, simplifies operations, and reduces service latency.

Multi-tenant databases

Within a microservices architecture, a single Redis Enterprise cluster can provide databases to many different services, each with its own isolated instance, tuned for the given workload. Each database instance is deployed, scaled, and modeled independently of the others, while leveraging the same cluster environment, isolating data between services without increasing operational complexity.

Flexible across clouds

Microservices provide a great deal of technology flexibility, and choosing where you want to run your database should be no exception. Redis Enterprise can be deployed anywhere: on any cloud platform, on-premises, or in a multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud architecture. It is also available on Kubernetes, Pivotal Kubernetes Service (PKS), and Red Hat OpenShift.