Intro to Redis Cluster Sharding – Advantages, Limitations, Deploying & Client Connections

Redis Cluster is the native sharding implementation available within Redis that allows you to automatically distribute your data across multiple nodes without having to rely on external tools and utilities. At ScaleGrid, we recently added support for Redis Clusters on our platform through our fully managed Redis hosting plans. In this post, we’re going to introduce you to the advanced Redis Cluster sharding opportunities, discuss its advantages and limitations, when you should deploy, and how to connect to your Redis Cluster.

Sharding with Redis Cluster

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Hot Trend: Move Behavior to Data for a New Interactive Application Architecture

Two forces account for the trend of moving behavior to data: larger values used in key-value stores and spotty cloud networks. For some time we've seen functions pushed close to data with MapReduce, which is a batch process, but we are now seeing this model extend to interactive applications, which match the current emphasis on highly scalable, real-time, event driven applications.

To see the trend look at the increasing support for collocated behavior at the datastore level:

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Sharding and Connection Pools

Hi we are looking at sharding our existing Java/Oracle based application. We are looking to make the app servers able to process requests for multiple (any?) shard. The concern that has come up is the amount of memory that would be consumed by having so many connection pools on one app server. Additionally there is concern about having so many physical connections to the database server coming from all the various app servers that may talk to that particular shard. I was wondering if anyone else has dealt with this issue and how you resolved it? Thanks, Scott

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Alternative Memcache Usage: A Highly Scalable, Highly Available, In-Memory Shard Index

While working with Memcache the other night, it dawned on me that it’s usage as a distributed caching mechanism was really just one of many ways to use it. That there are in fact many alternative usages that one could find for Memcache if they could just realize what Memcache really is at its core – a simple distributed hash-table – is an important point worthy of further discussion. To be clear, when I say “simple”, by no means am I implying that Memcache’s implementation is simple, just that the ideas behind it are such. Think about that for a minute. What else could we use a simple distributed hash-table for, besides caching? How about using it as an alternative to the traditional shard lookup method we used in our Master Index Lookup scalability strategy, discussed previously here.

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Scalability Strategies Primer: Database Sharding

This article is a primer, intended to shine some much needed light on the logical, process oriented implementations of database scalability strategies in the form of a broad introduction. More specifically, the intent is to elaborate on the majority of these implementations by example.

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