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June 23, 2020

Redis Labs Announces RedisRaft

June 23, 2020 — Redis Labs unveiled RedisRaft, a module that enables multiple Redis servers to operate as a single fault-tolerant, consistent cluster. According to a blog posted below, Yossi Gottlieb, chief architect at Redis Labs, said the solution earned its name after the Raft consensus algorithm and the open source C library that implements the solution. Gottlieb details the solution’s origins touting its consistency and reliability.

Gottlieb writes: 

RedisRaft is a new Redis module that makes it possible to operate a number of Redis servers as a single fault-tolerant, strongly consistent cluster. As its name suggests, it is based on the Raft consensus algorithm and an open-source C library that implements it.

RedisRaft brings a new strong-consistency with strict serialization deployment option to Redis and the Redis ecosystem. The new module makes it possible to use Redis along with Redis’ existing clients, libraries, and data types in beyond-cache scenarios requiring a high level of reliability and consistency.

RedisRaft’s beginnings

RedisRaft started as an experimental “side project” shortly before Redis 5 was released. The Redis module API was introduced in Redis 4, primarily designed to support modules that implement new data types and commands. We wanted to explore how far we could stretch the API, and use modules to extend Redis in even more radical ways. But we also wanted to end up with something useful—a strong consistency deployment option for Redis.

A RedisRaft cluster offers the same level of consistency and reliability expected from reliable, well-known data stores such as ZooKeeper or Etcd. In a nutshell, in RedisRaft:

  • Acknowledged writes are guaranteed to be committed and never lost.
  • Reads will always return the most up-to-date committed write.

As expected from reliable data stores offering this level of consistency, such guarantees bring trade-offs in performance and availability. In RedisRaft:

  • Client operations depend on cluster nodes exchanging messages, so they become bound to network latency.
  • Writes must be flushed to disk before completing, so they become bound to disk I/O latency.
  • The cluster is available only as long as a majority of the nodes are up, healthy, and able to communicate with each other.

For the full blog, visit https://redislabs.com/blog/redisraft-new-strong-consistency-deployment-option/

About Redis Labs

Modern businesses depend on the power of real-time data. With Redis Labs, organizations deliver instant experiences in a highly reliable and scalable manner. Redis Labs is the home of Redis, the world’s most popular in-memory database and commercial provider of Redis Enterprise that delivers superior performance, matchless reliability and unparalleled flexibility for high-speed transactions, recommendation engines, data ingest, fraud mitigation, real-time indexing, session management, and caching.


Source: Yossi Gottlieb, Redis Labs 

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