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Comment by zerop | Hacker News Reader

Never understood why would someone like to use hosted Redis solutions from redis-cloud, redistogo etc... Their Customers are developers.. why cant developers spawn an instance with Redis on it and use it themselves.. how does this hosted redis business model work..?

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I have modest needs from Redis -- basically I want a queue ~1000 items long, under 1MB per item.

I could provision a couple of EC2 servers, get Redis going on them, set up some sort of monitoring, some failover mechanism, etc. $X/month.

Or I could pay someone $Y/month to give me a Redis server I can use, and not have to care about the rest, so I can spend time worrying about things more relevant to my actual goals.

If $Y is not much more than $X, it's a very easy decision.

If you have modest needs of it, just run it on the same machine.

The whole point of redis is low latency data queries, which running on some third-party service you lose.

That might be a point of Redis, but it's certainly not the whole point, as I don't care about it but Redis is still useful to me.

And again, just because I can do it myself doesn't mean I should. I came into adulthood as a sysadmin. I can take a project from bolting racks into the floor to writing front-end code, but I don't. There are better ways.

> just run it on the same machine

Sometimes you don't have that option (e.g. Heroku).

You just answered your own question. Their customers are developers, i.e., a scarce and expensive resource who's time is most effectively spent developing rather than configuring, tuning, monitoring and otherwise maintaining server parks, virtual or not.

But redis doesn't really require any of that - it'll run and provide decent performance on a small instance, or even better, running on the same instance your app is running.

"yum -y install redis" then "service redis start" and it just works. I'm not sure there is an easier service to use than local redis.

Interesting concept, but how does that scale?

Scale? I thought the use case was modest load?

Either way, I do 30K/sec queries on a single redis instance on a small instance - the performance is quite exceptional.

Fair enough. 30k/sec sounds pretty nice. Sadly, I imagine that's a local instance. We need a solution that can handle orders of magnitude more than that though. Which, from my understanding, means multiple instances. And I have no experience with scaling Redis. I'd kill for a good turn-key solution.

Edit: Someone contact me. I want to give you money!

I have no personal experience using redis-cloud, but their website[1] does give a good overview of their features. Currently, redis has no native clustering/sharding support AFAIK, but cloud based services like redis-cloud seem to be offering exactly that, in a very transparent way. It also seems to be taking care of monitoring, backups etc.

[1] - http://redis-cloud.com/redis/redis-comparison

As a representative from one of the competitors mentioned there, I can tell you that feature list is dishonest and absurd.

When someone offers you "infinite scale", run.

Hi there,

I'd love to help you. We (RedisGreen) run extremely high-performance, dedicated Redis installations and work directly with customers to help tune their app and their installation for the best possible service.

Getting Redis up and running is easy, as has been mentioned in this thread. But the devil is in the details. Third-party vendors distinguish themselves in terms of active monitoring, quality/knowledge of support, and closed-source features (e.g. one company offers what they call "multicore Redis").

I've been running large-scale production instances of Redis since 2009, and our other team members are similarly qualified.

I'd love to help you out and give you honest recommendations on system scaling. bpo at stovepipestudios.com

Actually, I have several TBs of redis capacity online and run millions of queries a second against it. I was speaking to a simple use case.

A bit of googling will answer most of your redis scaling questions.

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