Introduction

On-premises databases have been around for a long time. In the past, companies wanted to store all their data within their own four walls, often believing this offered greater security. Additionally, scaling up resources could also be only done by buying costly hardware that could take weeks, or even months, to provision and implement.

Over the past decade, cloud computing has become an enormous part of our lives. Beginning as a slow trickle from on-premises to the cloud, we’ve reached a point where entire organizations operate in the cloud. This trend has come about primarily because as security systems have improved over time, it has rapidly become a secure option to store your data on the cloud.

Most cloud computing platforms also offer services to make the migration process quick and easy for their clients. Some cloud platforms, however, are better suited for specific databases than others.

Take Redis, for example. Since its initial release in 2009, Redis has allowed organizations to store a vast quantity of data on a server that can be accessed at their convenience. It is as simple as storing a dataset on a disk and letting applications access it.

Redis has become one of the most well-known data structure stores primarily because of its ease of use, including for caching, messaging, real-time leaderboards, and so on.

What is Redis?

Redis, which stands for Remote Dictionary Server, is an open-source, in-memory data structure store that can be used as a cache, a database, or a message broker. The in-memory database gives Redis a clear advantage as a storage system since its design allows it to keep the whole dataset in RAM. Keeping the dataset in RAM is a massive advantage since accessing RAM is 150,000 times faster than accessing the disk and 500 times faster than accessing SSD. Leveraging RAM also means that organizations only need to access the main memory each time to update or query data in a database instead of accessing the disk.

While storing data on RAM often means that the organization will lose its data in the event of a reboot or crash, Redis solves this by allowing organizations to persist their data to the disk via two options, depending on your use case. Organizations can either periodically store their data to disk or append commands to a disk-based log, ensuring their data remains safe.

On-premises Redis

Although running Redis on-premises remains a viable option for many organizations, it’s essential to future proof applications, especially those running on legacy on-premises databases. Cloud databases now offer a highly secure, fully managed database with virtually unlimited scalability while being cost-effective.

Azure Cache for Redis

Organizations seeking to migrate their on-premises Redis database to the cloud may be curious about Azure Cache for Redis, Microsoft’s solution for cloud-based Redis databases.

Azure Cache for Redis provides organizations with an in-memory store based on Redis. It offers both open-source and commercial products from Redis Labs as a managed service. Azure hosts the service, and it is accessible to virtually all applications within or outside Azure.

Here’s why we think migrating to Azure Cache for Redis can give you a jump ahead:

1. Flexibility & performance –

Azure Cache offers support for various Redis versions so organizations can choose which version works best for them. It also ensures that if the application supports Redis, it will run with Azure Cache for Redis. Azure Cache helps organizations focus on freeing up entangled resources, enabling organizations to improve core business practices and overall efficiency. Azure Cache achieves this by handling millions of requests per second with sub-millisecond latency via a fully managed service with automatic patching, scaling, and provisioning. Additionally, in-memory data stores are capable of super-fast performance, with average read or write operations taking less than a millisecond.

2. Security –

Azure offers organizations the best-in-class enterprise security solutions. Azure strives to ensure that data remains protected in its systems by receiving more certifications than any other cloud provider. Microsoft is also known to spend more than 1 billion USD annually on cybersecurity, with more than 3,500 security experts making it one of the most highly secure cloud servers.

3. Availability –

Azure Cache has built-in high availability, the goal of which is to ensure that Redis instances remain live in case of an outage in its underlying VMs. The primary purpose of using multiple VMs in this setup is to increase the availability percentage rates. It does this by using multiple VMs, called nodes, for a cache. The nodes are configured so that data replication and failovers happen in a synchronized manner. Azure Cache also gives organizations an option of disaster recovery via Geo-replication. Geo-replication allows them to configure an Azure Cache for Redis instance in a different Azure region to back up their primary cache.

Next Steps

We at Neal Analytics hold in-depth expertise in running end-to-end migration projects and can jump in to help out at any stage of the migration process.

If you are ready to take the next step towards migrating Redis to Azure Cache for Redis, Contact us