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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. In-Memory Databases
  4. In Memory Databases
  5. Redis vs Serverless

Redis vs Serverless

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Redis
Redis
Stacks61.9K
Followers46.5K
Votes3.9K
GitHub Stars42
Forks6
Serverless
Serverless
Stacks2.2K
Followers1.2K
Votes28
GitHub Stars46.9K
Forks5.7K

Redis vs Serverless: What are the differences?

Developers describe Redis as "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. On the other hand, Serverless is detailed as "The most widely-adopted toolkit for building serverless applications". Build applications comprised of microservices that run in response to events, auto-scale for you, and only charge you when they run. This lowers the total cost of maintaining your apps, enabling you to build more logic, faster. The Framework uses new event-driven compute services, like AWS Lambda, Google CloudFunctions, and more.

Redis and Serverless are primarily classified as "In-Memory Databases" and "Serverless / Task Processing" tools respectively.

"Performance" is the primary reason why developers consider Redis over the competitors, whereas "API integration " was stated as the key factor in picking Serverless.

Redis and Serverless are both open source tools. It seems that Redis with 37.4K GitHub stars and 14.4K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Serverless with 30.9K GitHub stars and 3.43K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Redis has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3261 company stacks & 1781 developers stacks; compared to Serverless, which is listed in 117 company stacks and 44 developer stacks.

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Advice on Redis, Serverless

Tim
Tim

CTO at Checkly Inc.

Sep 18, 2019

Needs adviceonHerokuHerokuAWS LambdaAWS Lambda

When adding a new feature to Checkly rearchitecting some older piece, I tend to pick Heroku for rolling it out. But not always, because sometimes I pick AWS Lambda . The short story:

  • Developer Experience trumps everything.
  • AWS Lambda is cheap. Up to a limit though. This impact not only your wallet.
  • If you need geographic spread, AWS is lonely at the top.

The setup

Recently, I was doing a brainstorm at a startup here in Berlin on the future of their infrastructure. They were ready to move on from their initial, almost 100% Ec2 + Chef based setup. Everything was on the table. But we crossed out a lot quite quickly:

  • Pure, uncut, self hosted Kubernetes — way too much complexity
  • Managed Kubernetes in various flavors — still too much complexity
  • Zeit — Maybe, but no Docker support
  • Elastic Beanstalk — Maybe, bit old but does the job
  • Heroku
  • Lambda

It became clear a mix of PaaS and FaaS was the way to go. What a surprise! That is exactly what I use for Checkly! But when do you pick which model?

I chopped that question up into the following categories:

  • Developer Experience / DX 🤓
  • Ops Experience / OX 🐂 (?)
  • Cost 💵
  • Lock in 🔐

Read the full post linked below for all details

357k views357k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Redis
Redis
Serverless
Serverless

Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams.

Build applications comprised of microservices that run in response to events, auto-scale for you, and only charge you when they run. This lowers the total cost of maintaining your apps, enabling you to build more logic, faster. The Framework uses new event-driven compute services, like AWS Lambda, Google CloudFunctions, and more.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
42
GitHub Stars
46.9K
GitHub Forks
6
GitHub Forks
5.7K
Stacks
61.9K
Stacks
2.2K
Followers
46.5K
Followers
1.2K
Votes
3.9K
Votes
28
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 888
    Performance
  • 542
    Super fast
  • 514
    Ease of use
  • 444
    In-memory cache
  • 324
    Advanced key-value cache
Cons
  • 15
    Cannot query objects directly
  • 3
    No secondary indexes for non-numeric data types
  • 1
    No WAL
Pros
  • 14
    API integration
  • 7
    Supports cloud functions for Google, Azure, and IBM
  • 3
    Lower cost
  • 1
    3. Simplified Management for developers to focus on cod
  • 1
    Openwhisk
Integrations
No integrations available
Azure Functions
Azure Functions
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Amazon API Gateway
Amazon API Gateway

What are some alternatives to Redis, Serverless?

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you. You can use AWS Lambda to extend other AWS services with custom logic, or create your own back-end services that operate at AWS scale, performance, and security.

Azure Functions

Azure Functions

Azure Functions is an event driven, compute-on-demand experience that extends the existing Azure application platform with capabilities to implement code triggered by events occurring in virtually any Azure or 3rd party service as well as on-premises systems.

Google Cloud Run

Google Cloud Run

A managed compute platform that enables you to run stateless containers that are invocable via HTTP requests. It's serverless by abstracting away all infrastructure management.

Hazelcast

Hazelcast

With its various distributed data structures, distributed caching capabilities, elastic nature, memcache support, integration with Spring and Hibernate and more importantly with so many happy users, Hazelcast is feature-rich, enterprise-ready and developer-friendly in-memory data grid solution.

Aerospike

Aerospike

Aerospike is an open-source, modern database built from the ground up to push the limits of flash storage, processors and networks. It was designed to operate with predictable low latency at high throughput with uncompromising reliability – both high availability and ACID guarantees.

MemSQL

MemSQL

MemSQL converges transactions and analytics for sub-second data processing and reporting. Real-time businesses can build robust applications on a simple and scalable infrastructure that complements and extends existing data pipelines.

Apache Ignite

Apache Ignite

It is a memory-centric distributed database, caching, and processing platform for transactional, analytical, and streaming workloads delivering in-memory speeds at petabyte scale

SAP HANA

SAP HANA

It is an application that uses in-memory database technology that allows the processing of massive amounts of real-time data in a short time. The in-memory computing engine allows it to process data stored in RAM as opposed to reading it from a disk.

Google Cloud Functions

Google Cloud Functions

Construct applications from bite-sized business logic billed to the nearest 100 milliseconds, only while your code is running

Knative

Knative

Knative provides a set of middleware components that are essential to build modern, source-centric, and container-based applications that can run anywhere: on premises, in the cloud, or even in a third-party data center

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