November 2019 Summaries

AWS re:Invent is a major annual conference that brings together over 65,000 cloud professionals, but it can be challenging to sift through the noise and news generated at the event. To help, we've compiled a list of top people to follow for insightful commentary on AWS and re:Invent, including industry experts, thought leaders, and analysts who provide analytical, humorous, and fun takes on all things cloud and technology. Notable figures include Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist for AWS; Jeff Blankenburg, Alexa Evangelist at AWS; Vicki Boykis, data science and machine learning expert; Sam Charrington, machine learning and AI expert; Cloud Opinion, an anonymous account delivering parody content; Yan Cui, consultant and expert on serverless computing; Emily Freeman, Modern Operations Advocacy Manager at Microsoft; Abby Fuller, Principal Technologist focusing on container work at AWS; Arun Gupta, AWS evangelist focusing on open source and containers; Lydia Leong, Gartner analyst covering cloud computing; RedMonk, an analyst firm charting the rise of developers as kings within organizations; Corey Quinn, Cloud Economist at Duckbill Group; and Redisinc, which will provide updates from their booth and sessions. By following these individuals and organizations, attendees can stay informed about the latest developments in the cloud industry and re:Invent.

The Redis Day London event brought together hundreds of developers and professionals for training, thought leadership sessions, and networking. The two-day event featured training sessions led by Redis experts, including Kyle Davis and Loris Cro, as well as keynotes from Salvatore Sanfilippo, the creator of Redis, and Yiftach Shoolman, the CTO and co-founder. The event provided a platform for attendees to learn about the latest updates in Redis and share their experiences with the community. Customers from various industries, including dating websites and online fantasy games, shared how they used Redis to solve problems and improve performance. The event also featured sessions on topics such as data modeling, clustering, and probabilistic data structures, providing opportunities for attendees to ask questions and challenge their assumptions about data. Despite a last-minute venue change, the event was a success, with attendees connecting and learning from each other in a lively and insightful atmosphere.

To prepare for the Redis Certified Developer exam, one must study the comprehensive study guide, which covers seven sections including general computer science knowledge, Redis keys, data structures, data modeling, debugging, performance and correctness, and working with Redis clusters. Hands-on experience with the Redis CLI and experimenting with different data structures and commands are also essential. Taking practice exams and identifying knowledge gaps will help maximize chances of passing, while Redis University courses can provide additional preparation and knowledge. With a thorough understanding of these topics and sufficient hands-on experience, individuals can prepare themselves for the certification exam and become a proficient Redis developer.

The Redis DevOps team experienced a significant outage in the AWS eu-central region due to an issue with one of the data centers. The outage affected multiple clusters, but thanks to their multi-AZ database configuration, all customers were unaffected and operations continued without significant downtime. This was made possible by several key principles, including in-memory replication, master and replica instances deployed across different zones, external persistent memory for fast recovery, uneven node deployment, and careful zone balancing. The Redis Enterprise Cloud architecture allows for an industry-leading five-nines availability, making it suitable for mission-critical use cases requiring sub-millisecond latency at high throughput.

The author describes their motivation to bring Redis modules into ARM land, specifically targeting IoT devices. They introduce RedisEdge, an aggregate of three Redis modules (RedisGears, RedisAI, and RedisTimeSeries), which can be run as a Docker image. The author explains that they will take each component of RedisEdge (RedisTimeSeries, RedisGears, and RedisAI) and describe how to port them to ARM platforms using various build methods, including automating the process for each component. They emphasize the importance of testing on physical ARM devices rather than virtualized/emulated/containerized tests and recommend using a Raspberry Pi 4 with Raspbian or Ubuntu as the target device. The author also outlines the steps needed to set up a network connection between the Raspberry Pi and a workstation, including setting up NFS for sharing files between the two.

When it comes to databases, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who love typing commands and those who prefer visual interaction with their data. Now, Redis offers a solution that combines both approaches, introducing RedisInsight, a graphical user interface (GUI) tool for manipulating and visualizing Redis data, available for free download on Windows, macOS, and Linux. With RedisInsight, users can explore and interact with their data visually, analyze memory usage, perform bulk operations, manage clusters, view slow logs, and more, making it easier to use and optimize Redis databases. The tool was developed after acquiring RDBTools, a popular GUI tool for Redis, and now offers a single place for both CLI- and GUI-based interactions with Redis databases.

The Redis Enterprise Kubernetes Operator has added Automated cluster recovery to its toolset, allowing users to manage stateful services like Redis clusters as if they were stateless, enabling faster and more reliable testing, deployment, and management of Redis across environments. This new feature empowers system operators and developers to test, deploy, and manage Redis in production with reduced complexity, and can recover a cluster from failure or quorum loss in just minutes, minimizing downtime and business impact. The recovery process is fully automated, predictable, and consistent, reducing the risk of human error and improving overall resilience in production environments.

The author was developing a Rust program, redismodule-rs, which is a Redis module written in Rust, and encountered the need to set up a custom memory allocator. Normally, when a Rust program needs to allocate some memory, it uses the global allocator defined in the program, but this behavior is problematic for Redis modules because they are built as shared libraries that may not use the system allocator or jemalloc, which can lead to inconsistent allocation behavior and invisible memory allocations. To solve this issue, the author implemented a custom memory allocator using the GlobalAlloc trait, which provides hooks like RedisModule_Alloc and RedisModule_Free to make Redis aware of allocated memory. However, when building a module with this custom allocator and loading it into Redis, it crashed due to a null pointer dereference caused by name mangling in Rust. The author discovered that the functions of the Redis modules API are accessed via C function pointers, which are initialized explicitly by Redis as part of the module initialization process, causing a chicken-and-egg problem. After experimenting with various approaches, the author found a solution by adding a flag to the custom allocator that causes allocations to be passed through to the system allocator at startup and toggles it after the module initialization is complete, ensuring that all previously allocated memory is freed before switching.

Redis Developer Certification is a program that allows software developers to demonstrate their mastery of Redis, a high-performance, multi-purpose, in-memory database that scales easily but delivers sophisticated functionality. The certification comprises an extensive study guide, a practice test, and a formal certification exam, which focuses on Redis's core functionality, including data structures, performance awareness, debugging, and writing code against clustered Redis deployments. Passing the exam with a passing score earns developers a digital badge and certificate, while also adding valuable skills to their quiver for optimizing data management problems. The certification is designed for developers who want to learn the full breadth and power of Redis's feature set and prepare themselves to use it in an efficient way possible. It is also a great way to show one's Redis mastery to potential employers and engineering teams, and can be taken by anyone who wants to level up their Redis skill set.

Redis Day London 2019 is a free one-day event for Redis-oriented developers and professionals, featuring speakers on new Redis features, best practices, and future updates. The event will take place at the Park Plaza London Riverbank Hotel on November 12, 2019, with a lineup of 19 experts including Salvatore Sanfilippo, Yiftach Shoolman, and Elena Kolevska. The day will also include hands-on training on Monday, November 11, prior to the main event, as well as a reception and networking opportunities. Registration is now open, offering attendees a chance to learn from Redis experts and network with fellow users.