March 2018 Summaries

Silkke is an animation company that created 3D avatars of high quality to be used in various applications and websites, aiming to bring a human element to digital platforms. They face the challenge of scanning individuals to create these avatars, requiring scalability and efficient processing power. To address this, they use RabbitMQ for queuing tasks and Redis for managing content, processes, and monitoring, allowing them to scale efficiently. Redis also helps with synchronizing dynamic character movement in multiplayer games by utilizing rooms, pub-sub systems, and sockets, enabling the handling of a large number of avatars simultaneously. The company leverages Redis's capabilities for speed, reliability, and scalability in various projects.

GDPR is a regulation that harmonizes data privacy laws across the EU and protects private information for European citizens, requiring organizations to be more diligent about how they collect and store data. Non-compliance penalties can be significant, affecting all organizations worldwide that collect or use personal data tied to EU residents. To prepare for GDPR, organizations must adapt their environment and consider database compliance, which involves policy definition and enforcement, evaluation of the complex application and IT landscape, automation, and modernization of infrastructure if necessary. Redis Enterprise is a secure database that provides controls to meet security standards, including data encryption at rest and in transit, isolation using distinct credentials, multi-layer security configuration for access control and authentication, and more. Organizations can learn more about Redis Enterprise's capabilities by attending the annual user conference, RedisConf, which will include training programs, keynotes, sessions, and topics delivered by industry leaders and experts.

This new cryptojacking attack incorporates Redis in a complicated manner, but fortunately, following basic configuration and security best practices can prevent it from affecting users. Redis Enterprise is completely impervious to this attack due to its built-in multi-layer security control, including access control, authentication, authorization, forensics, encryption, and protection layers. The attack exploits poor decisions related to Redis settings, such as running on the open internet without a password or firewall, using default port 6379, and manually altering configuration settings to increase vulnerability. Users can protect themselves by following security best practices and using Redis Enterprise, which provides a pure separation between management and data-plane planes, making it more secure than open-source Redis.

Kubernetes provides automated container orchestration and the management of containers in a highly available, distributed environment, enabling development teams to move fast, deploy software efficiently, and operate at scale. A managed Kubernetes cluster running on Google Cloud is used for this demo, where Redis Enterprise 5.x is deployed on top of it. To deploy Redis Enterprise, a Kubernetes secret object called `rp-secret` is created using the `kubectl create secret generic` command, followed by deploying headless service, controller, and Redis statefulset manifests using YAML files. Upon successful deployment, a database is created using the web interface, and the Redis Enterprise service controller publishes the endpoint of the database in the Kubernetes service catalog. The combination of Kubernetes and a super performant and highly available Redis Enterprise database will help organizations innovate faster in the new era of application development and delivery.

On March 7th, 2018, the Israeli Redis community held its third annual event, attended by nearly 300 people. The day-long conference featured 16 sessions and guest speakers from various high-tech companies, discussing their experiences with Redis. Additionally, laboratorists from Redis presented on new developments in the technology. Redis' creator Salvatore Sanfilippo demonstrated a live command-line demo of Redis Stream data structure, while other presentations covered topics such as distributed graph databases and time series store.

A recent survey of 130 customers using Redis Enterprise revealed that nearly 80% plan to increase their usage of the platform to meet growing business needs. The top two most common uses for Redis Enterprise are user session stores and high-speed transactions, with consistent usage across real-time analytics, notifications, time-series data, and geospatial indexing. Customers value Redis Enterprise's high availability features, such as data persistence, auto-failover, and cross-zone/multi-region/multi-data center in-memory replication. Additionally, 50% of customers appreciate the built-in seamless scale and clustering capabilities. The platform is increasingly being used as a primary database, with 67% of respondents storing data exclusively in Redis Enterprise.

Go and Redis share similarities in being fast, simple and performance-driven, making them popular choices among developers. Both are used for different tasks but offer improved performance without sacrificing simplicity. The blog post on using Redis with Go provides a comprehensive guide to developing application cache, session store, counters, real-time analytics, publish/subscribe and job queue management. Popular clients like Redigo and Radix provide easy-to-use APIs for interacting with Redis from Go.