January 2018 Summaries

This installment of the tutorial covers how to efficiently import large CSV files into RediSearch, a full-text search engine, using Node.js and the Async queue library. The tutorial uses the TMDB dataset to demonstrate how to ingest data from two different files: movies and cast/crew. The process involves parsing the CSV file, creating an index in RediSearch, and then searching for specific documents using a script that takes a search string as input. The tutorial also covers how to get individual documents from RediSearch using a similar script, and provides scripts to drop existing indexes and run search queries. By the end of this installment, users should have a good understanding of how to manage the lifecycle of a dataset in RediSearch.

Redis Enterprise is a distributed NoSQL database engine that adds to the power of open-source Redis with an enhanced deployment architecture, delivering increased scalability, availability, security, and lower total cost of ownership. It provides advanced security controls to help simplify compliance with self-imposed or regulatory compliance requirements such as HIPAA, FISMA, PCI, GDPR, and others. The separation of paths for administrative access and data access equips Redis Enterprise with finer grain security controls, simplifying compliance and providing applications and developers with full access to one of the databases in the cluster without requiring cluster administration privileges. Security controls include authentication and authorization, encryption for "data in motion" and "data at rest", forensics and logging, and defense in depth, which requires considering all attack vectors beyond configuring security controls and securing the underlying infrastructure. Redis Enterprise provides role-based access control, source IP filtering, TLS/SSL-based encryption, transparent filesystem encryption capabilities, detailed logs, alerts, and tracing facilities to track administrative actions and events.

With the recent security vulnerabilities discovered — Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) and Spectre (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715) — Redis’ engineering, devops and support teams have been working hard to make sure our cloud services, Redis Enterprise Cloud (REC) and Redis Enterprise VPC (REV), are protected. As of now, all our REC and REV clusters on AWS, Azure, GCP and IBM Cloud have been patched by our cloud partners against Meltdown. In addition, some cloud vendors have already managed to mitigate the Spectre’s branch target injection (CVE-2017-5715). Redis Enterprise Software customers experienced negligible performance impacts of between 2.5% - 30%, depending on cluster instance types and cloud infrastructure, with successful mitigation for several customers during recent days. The engineering team has validated this impact through tests on a 3-node REV cluster on AWS, observing no effect on latency and minor throughput impacts.

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system used for deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications. Minikube is a tool that allows users to run a single-node Kubernetes cluster on their local machine. This blog post demonstrates the steps needed to set up Minikube and run a 3-node Redis Enterprise cluster on a laptop using the homebrew package manager. The process involves installing Minikube, starting the cluster with specific memory and disk size parameters, verifying the installation, deploying the Redis Enterprise service in Minikube, and setting up the Redis Enterprise cluster as a master node. Finally, the blog post explains how to create a database on the master node using the Rest API of Redis Enterprise and access the dashboard through a secure tunnel.