Introduction to Redis Labs Enterprise Cluster (RLEC)

Who is RLEC Good For?

Redis is a great technology, it is VERY fast, it is very simple to use and at the same time very sophisticated and powerful. For these reasons Redis has seen tremendous adoption and has become a mainstay of modern day application stacks.

When you need to use Redis in more complex scenarios and treat it as a full blown database (with high-availability and scalability in order to be able to grow to big datasets) or as a highly available and scalable cache, you can use enhancements like Redis Sentinel and Redis Cluster. Once again great technologies, but not trivial to get initially deployed or manage afterwards.

Some customers would like to use Redis as a full blown product vs. a set of great technologies. What differentiates a technology from a product in my view is the ability to seamlessly use Redis for any need, from the most simple usage scenario, like a volatile cache on a single server, to the most complex scenario, like a huge highly-available sharded database that can span multiple servers and survive server crashes.

Another aspect that differentiates using a technology vs. a product in my mind is getting a full-blown management UI to manage and monitor the Redis databases, as well as end-to-end support for your Redis deployment and how to use it.

Lastly, in spite of the growing demand by companies to use open-source technologies, many companies would like the technology to be commercially supported and backed by a company that is committed to the future of the product and can provide support for any need. If you ever consult the big analyst firms, they always recommend against using the open-source technology as-is without getting commercial support for it.

For the above reasons we have created Redis Labs Enterprise Cluster (RLEC): to completely relieve you of the burden related to deploying, provisioning, configuring, managing and monitoring Redis. RLEC makes it really simple to ensure high-availability across racks or data-centers, create and manage a clustered Redis database and provide automatic cluster rebalancing. With RLEC, you also gain commercial support for your Redis usage, provided by Redis Labs.

What Does RLEC Give You Beyond Open-Source Redis?

RLEC is practically a multi-tenant system that acts as a container for running multiple databases on the same cluster infrastructure. Each database can be from the following configuration:

• Simple Redis database (i.e. a single master shard)
• Highly-available Redis database (i.e. master / slave shards or master / multi-slave shards)
• Redis clustered database (i.e. multiple master shards)
• Highly-available Redis clustered database (i.e. multiple master shards each with its own slave shard, or multiple master / multi-slave shards)

As a result, after installing RLEC (which is a simple task by itself that I will cover in an upcoming blog post) you can easily provision and manage multiple Redis databases, spanning multiple servers, while maintaining high-availability, and be able to scale up or down the databases as your needs change. You can do all of this through RLEC’s management UI, through the rladmin Command Line Interface (CLI), or through a REST API. In addition you can view various statistics to understand what is going on in each of your databases, each of the cluster nodes, or in the cluster as a whole. Apart from viewing these, you can sign up to receive alerts in the UI itself, and via email, as well as be notified by the cluster, on different events or thresholds, so you can be aware and take actions.

There are many more advanced capabilities and logic that we have implemented as part of RLEC that are too long or sophisticated to cover in this post, but you can read more about these in the RLEC documentation.

Why Should You Trust RLEC?

It is important to note that although RLEC is inherently running the open source Redis, we, at Redis Labs, have implemented a lot of intellectual property within RLEC to better manage Redis as a highly-available and scalable database.

This intellectual property has been built for several years while running the same technology as a cloud service named Redis Cloud that is available on all major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCE, SoftLayer, etc.) and has helped thousands of our customers survive multiple server failures, as well as entire datacenter failures.

What we’ve done now in RLEC is taken this technology we’ve built during the years and repackaged it as downloadable and installable software that you can install anywhere you’d like, whether on your own cloud instances, or your servers running within your private data-center. We’ve gotten demand for this ability from customers who were not able to use our cloud service for various reasons, such as customers who cannot run on a public cloud platform, customers who want to run within their virtual private cloud and cannot connect from it to an external service, or customers who need to comply to different information security standards.

So How Do You Get Started with RLEC?

Like I indicated above, getting started with RLEC is very simple, and I will cover more detailed information on that in a future post, but you can probably figure it out yourself using our documentation and get started by:

1. Download RLEC from https://redislabs.com/redis-enterprise-downloads
2. Follow the instructions at https://redislabs.com/redis-enterprise-documentation/installing-and-upgrading/accessing-and-installing-the-setup-package