May 2020 Summaries

While the RedisConf 2020 Takeaway conference has concluded, its content remains available to view on-demand in the Video Library on RedisConf.com. The event featured breakout sessions, training sessions, keynotes, and live Q&As, with nearly 4,000 attendees participating and over 13,000 sessions watched during the live event. Various community members presented their work, including Ana Margarita Medina discussing chaos engineering, Vishy Kasar explaining Redis 6's security-focused features, Phyo Kyaw and Afshin Salek showcasing how Uber used Redis Streams to improve performance, and Carlos Justiniano highlighting RedisGraph's use in advanced medical simulations. Other notable sessions included using RedisAI for fake news detection, building a message bus with Redis Streams and FastAPI, and deploying Consul Connect inside a Kubernetes cluster. These sessions are now available to watch on-demand.

Redis can help build a healthcare provider finder by utilizing its geospatial capabilities and the Search and Query module, which provides a rich query capability that allows for flexible searching with features like location-based searches, tag-based searches, and more. With Redis, patients can find healthcare providers near them based on their location, and the system can handle complex queries to filter results based on specific services offered by each provider. The Search and Query module is flexible enough to handle various operations, such as name and name prefix search, sound-alikes names, and street names, making it suitable for building a comprehensive healthcare provider finder application.

TransNexus is a telecom software provider that uses Redis Enterprise as a critical component of its cloud-based product ClearIP, which simplifies complex functions like preventing robocalls and enabling least-cost routing. The company's call processing typically takes 20 milliseconds to complete, with the aim of making users unaware of the process. TransNexus' design focuses on reliability, security, and high performance, leveraging a microservices architecture to scale as needed and maintain reliability. Redis acts as a real-time database, storing configuration data and ensuring instant responses to meet aggressive application requirements. It also serves as an intermediary queueing system, assigning jobs to cloud servers, and a historical information store for call histories and accounts. The company's reliance on Redis is so critical that it considers the database the "number-one most important database" in its operations.

The Rediscover Redis Competition was held during RedisConf 2020 Takeaway to showcase the versatility of Redis in powering innovative applications. For every valid entry received, $100 was donated to the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund. Three winners were chosen: Matthew Goos for MDmetrix's COVID-19 Mission Control, Randall Shane for Referred.ai, and Luiz Santos for ProvTransaction. Each winner received a Valve Index VR Kit worth $999. The competition encouraged developers to demonstrate Redis' capabilities beyond caching by creating apps with Redis data structures, event-driven architecture, and/or Redis modules.

RedisAI, an AI serving engine for Redis, is now generally available and designed to run where data lives, decreasing latency and increasing simplicity in various use cases such as transaction scoring, fraud detection, and recommendation engines personalization. It provides optimal performance when serving models due to its architecture that stores machine learning native data types in the memory space of the Redis server. RedisAI supports several integrated backends, including TensorFlow, Pytorch, and ONNXRuntime, and offers features like auto-batching support and the DAG command for increased efficiency during serving. Benchmarks reveal that RedisAI increases speed by up to 81x compared to other model serving platforms when the overall end-to-end time is not dominated by the inference itself.

RedisGears, a serverless engine for Redis, has been released to provide infinite programmability in the platform. Developers can use it to improve application performance and process data in real-time while architects can leverage it for architectural simplicity. The dynamic framework executes functions that implement data flows in Redis, abstracting away data distribution and deployment to speed up data processing using multiple models in Redis. It also allows users to program everything they want in Redis, deploy functions to every environment, simplify their architecture, reduce deployment costs, and run the serverless engine where their data lives.

RedisConf 2020 Takeaway` was a unique virtual event that brought together thousands of online attendees to share the latest news, product previews, and technical insights about Redis, a popular in-memory data store. The event highlighted the growing momentum of Redis and its enterprise-grade features, including Redis Enterprise 6.0, which provides improved security, management, and scalability for large-scale applications. Key announcements included the formal rollout of Redis Enterprise 6.0, the general availability of new technologies such as RedisGears 1.0 and RedisAI, a preview of RedisRaft, and an early-stage partnership around secure enclaves with Anjuna. The event also featured demos and presentations from industry leaders, including Salvatore Sanfilippo, who showcased the new features in Redis 6.0, and Julia Liuson, who discussed the expanded partnership between Microsoft and Redis, adding two new Enterprise Tiers to Azure Cache for Redis. Overall, `RedisConf 2020 Takeaway` demonstrated Redis' growing capabilities as a primary database for modern applications, with a focus on security, resiliency, and scalability.

RedisConf Takeaway, an online conference for Redis enthusiasts, was held from May 12-13, featuring keynotes, live Q&As, and sessions on Day 1 and training classes on Day 2. The event attracted nearly 4,000 attendees from 103 countries. This year's theme was "Rediscover," encouraging participants to explore the versatility of Redis beyond caching. The virtual reality-style interface allowed for interaction through custom avatars and various themed Group Discussion rooms. Over 50 on-demand sessions were available, along with live Q&As and training sessions. Participants engaged in over 1,500 games of Redis Pong and sent more than 3,700 chat messages and 12,212 emojis. The event also featured a partnership announcement between Redis and Microsoft, as well as live streams with industry leaders discussing topics such as microservices and working from home.

Encryption in use protects data when it is being processed in memory and is an emerging technology that promises to solve many limitations of client-side encryption. Client-side encryption, which encrypts data within an application before storing it in a database, has two significant limitations: it doesn't support functions like searching or incremental operations, and managing encryption keys across multiple applications can be complex and increase administrative overhead. Secure enclaves are private allocations of memory protected from use by external processes, and they offer a solution to these challenges. To successfully cross the chasm between early adoption and reaching the early majority, secure enclaves need four critical things: broad support from hardware vendors, cloud providers, and software makers; partnerships with organizations like Redis; increased awareness of the technology's benefits; and addressing any limitations or concerns associated with it.

The collaboration between Redis Labs and Microsoft has expanded to provide two new tiers of Azure Cache for Redis, powered by Redis Enterprise. This integration aims to improve developer productivity, ensure operational resiliency, and ease cloud migration. The new offering is currently in private preview and can be accessed through the Azure Marketplace. It provides enhanced security features, geo-replication capabilities, and exclusive tools offered by Redis within the native Azure environment.

Microsoft and Redis have announced the private preview availability of Redis Enterprise on Azure Cache for Redis, a significant milestone in their strategic collaboration. The integration combines Microsoft Azure's global presence, flexibility, and security with Redis Enterprise's unmatched availability, performance, and extended data-structure functionality to address key scalability and innovation challenges critical to enterprises. Customers can now launch Redis Enterprise in the Azure portal and take advantage of new features such as support for Redis 6.0, Redis modules, Redis-on-Flash, and active geo-replication for seamless failover. The service is fully managed by Microsoft Azure and supported jointly by the Microsoft Azure and Redis support and engineering teams. This collaboration aims to ease procurement processes, provide customers with continually improving ways to deploy and operate their data infrastructure, and address unprecedented demands for scale and performance in uncertain times.

Jenny is looking to buy a new pair of sandals for the summer, so she checks out her favorite retailer’s website and notices that each page takes forever to load. Instant database performance is critical because apps have only 100 milliseconds before users start feeling impatient. This can be as little as two round-trip requests and responses to internet servers, which can take a total of around 50ms. Modern databases must respond in under 1ms to avoid becoming a bottleneck. Today's databases face unprecedented challenges including working with large amounts of disparate data, returning results quickly, and coping with complex technology environments while remaining easy to work with and highly available. Staying up-to-date with industry trends is crucial to avoiding falling behind, which is why leaders and experts spend time analyzing the latest database trends. The new e-book "9 Things Your Database Must Do" provides insights into the eight requirements of modern databases, along with other resources for staying ahead of the curve.

Redis features two main mechanisms for executing multiple operations atomically: MULTI/EXEC transactions and Lua scripts. Transactions in Redis start with the MULTI command and are "one shot" - a sequence of commands that get executed all at once. WATCH is used to perform optimistic locking, ensuring that subsequent transactions will be executed only if the keys being watched have not changed before EXEC gets called. Lua scripts can read data from Redis without needing optimistic locking and are more efficient than "Watched" transactions because they don't require optimistic locking to read values. While WATCH can be very useful for performing articulated transactions, it’s usually easier and more efficient to use a Lua script when you need to perform multiple operations that depend on data in Redis.