Redis Cloud Gets Easier with Fully Managed Hosting on Azure

ScaleGrid, a rapidly growing leader in the Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) space, has just launched their new fully managed Redis on Azure service. This Redis management solution allows startups up to enterprise-level organizations automate their Redis operations on Microsoft Azure dedicated cloud servers, alongside their other open source database deployments, including MongoDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Redis, the #1 key-value store and top 10 database in the world, has grown by over 300% in popularity over that past 5 years, per the DB-Engines knowledge base. The demand for Redis is skyrocketing across dozens of use cases, particularly for cache, queues, geospatial data, and high speed transactions. This simple database management system makes it very easy to store and retrieve pairs of keys and values, and is commonly paired with other database types to increase the speed and performance of an application. According to the 2019 Open Source Database Report, a majority of Redis deployments are used in conjunction with MySQL, and over half of Redis deployments are used with either PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Elasticsearch.

ScaleGrid’s Redis hosting service allows these organizations to automate all of their time-consuming management tasks, such as backups, upgrades, scaling, replication, sharding, monitoring, alerts, log rotations, and OS patching, so their DBAs, developers, and DevOps teams can focus on new product development and optimizing performance. Additionally, organizations can customize their Redis persistence and host through their own Azure account which allows them to leverage advanced cloud capabilities like Azure Virtual Networks (VNET), Security Groups, and Reserved Instances to reduce long-term hosting costs up to 60%. 

“Cloud reliability has never been so important,” says Dharshan Rangegowda, Founder and CEO of ScaleGrid. “It’s crucial for organizations to properly configure their Redis deployments for high availability and disaster recovery, as a couple minutes of downtime can be detrimental to a company’s security and reputation.”

ScaleGrid is the only Redis cloud service that allows you to customize your master-slave and cross-datacenter configurations for 100% uptime and availability across 30 different Azure regions. They also allow you to keep full Redis admin access and SSH access to your machines, and you can learn more about their advantages over competitors Compose for Redis, RedisGreen, Redis Labs and Elasticache for Redis on their Compare Redis Providers page.

Product: Collectl - Performance Data Collector

From their website: There are a number of times in which you find yourself needing performance data. These can include benchmarking, monitoring a system's general heath or trying to determine what your system was doing at some time in the past. Sometimes you just want to know what the system is doing right now. Depending on what you're doing, you often end up using different tools, each designed to for that specific situation. Features include:

You are be able to run with non-integral sampling intervals.

Collectl uses very little CPU. In fact it has been measured to use <0.1% when run as a daemon using the default sampling interval of 60 seconds for process and slab data and 10 seconds for everything else.

Brief, verbose, and plot formats are supported.

You can report aggregated performance numbers on many devices such as CPUs, Disks, interconnects such as Infiniband or Quadrics, Networks or even Lustre file systems.

Collectl will align its sampling on integral second boundaries.

Supports process and slab monitoring.

New to the 2.4.0 release is the monitoring of process i/o statistics. Unlike most monitoring tools that either focus on a small set of statistics, format their output in only one way, run either interactively or as a daemon but not both, collectl tries to do it all. You can choose to monitor any of a broad set of subsystems which currently include cpu, disk, inodes, infiniband, lustre, memory, network, nfs, processes, quadrics, slabs, sockets and tcp. The following is an example of simply running the collectl command with no arguments and using its default settings. Below we see what the cpu, network and disk were doing while writing a large file: #<--------CPU--------><-----------Disks-----------><-----------Network----------> #cpu sys inter ctxsw KBRead Reads KBWrit Writes netKBi pkt-in netKBo pkt-out 37 37 382 188 0 0 27144 254 45 68 3 21 25 25 366 180 20 4 31280 296 0 1 0 0 25 25 368 183 0 0 31720 275 2 20 0 1 Output can also be saved in a rolling set of logs for later playback or displayed interactively in a variety of formats. If all that isn't enough there are additional mechanisms for supplying data to external tools via a socket interface or by generating its output as s-expressions, a format of choice for some tools such as supermon. You can even create files in space-separated formats for plotting with external packages like the one below which was done with gnuplot using 1 second samples.

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