Amazon RDS vs Redis: What are the differences?

What is Amazon RDS? Set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Amazon RDS gives you access to the capabilities of a familiar MySQL, Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server database engine. This means that the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing databases can be used with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period and enabling point-in-time recovery. You benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your Database Instance (DB Instance) via a single API call.

What is Redis? An in-memory database that persists on disk. Redis is an open source, BSD licensed, advanced key-value store. It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets.

Amazon RDS can be classified as a tool in the "SQL Database as a Service" category, while Redis is grouped under "In-Memory Databases".

"Reliable failovers", "Automated backups" and "Backed by amazon" are the key factors why developers consider Amazon RDS; whereas "Performance", "Super fast" and "Ease of use " are the primary reasons why Redis is favored.

Redis is an open source tool with 37.1K GitHub stars and 14.3K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Redis's open source repository on GitHub.

Airbnb, Uber Technologies, and Instagram are some of the popular companies that use Redis, whereas Amazon RDS is used by Airbnb, Netflix, and Coursera. Redis has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3239 company stacks & 1735 developers stacks; compared to Amazon RDS, which is listed in 1408 company stacks and 509 developer stacks.