
Amazon ElastiCache - Now With a Dash of Redis - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/09/amazon-elasticache-now-with-a-dash-of-redis.html
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level09
Based on a personal experience, I found that setting up a dedicated machine is
way cheaper than using those services.

I ended up replacing the following:

\- Mongodb on a EC2 instance instead of Dynamodb

\- EC2 Mysql instance instead of RDS

\- Redis instance instead of Elastic Cache

\- Solr on EC2 instead of Cloud Search

\- FFmpeg instance instead of Elastic transcoder

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nostromo
+1 for Mongodb on a EC2 instance instead of Dynamodb

We're transitioning off Dynamo as soon as possible as the billing structure
makes it either a real headache or very expensive.

For example: if you want to make a backup of a large table or move data
around, it'll either take days or cost you an arm and a leg. This is just one
of many annoyances. Ever since making the decision to go with Dynamo over
Mongo, I've been getting dirty looks from my team.

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andrewvc
The set of problems where you're really struggling between mongodb and
dynamodb as a choice is practically non-existent. They have hugely different
characteristics and vastly different trade-offs. You might want to spend some
time reading about the architecture of various databases before just picking
one.

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Goranek
seriously, you‘re comparing apples and oranges. Mongodb usecase has nothing to
do with dynamodb.

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andresdouglas
So basically we can now replace the painful SQS with hosted Redis! Yayy!

RE: Mongo. If you're using EC2 for MongoDB you're most likely doing it wrong.
Not sure if there is much written about the Foursquare problem out there,
maybe I'll get around to writing about it, one day. Pretty much the only
company that I know off doing bullet-proof, scalable and fast Mongo hosting is
[http://objectrocket.com/](http://objectrocket.com/). There's a reason
Rackspace acquired them. Unless you're able to get placement of your SSD
loaded servers in the same datacenters as Amazon, go with them. It's well
worth your time to not muck around with Mongo.

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skyebook
Good on them for doing this, its missing one substantial configuration option
though: Redis Authentication. Security groups are great, but it would be
comforting to have some challenge when hitting cache.

~~~
seanmccann
Exactly. This is especially important when using it in conjunction with
Heroku.

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derefr
So, how does ElastiCache fare compared to all the hosted Redis-as-a-service
(or Redis-as-a-PaaS-addon) products?

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whalesalad
Well unless you roll with a Micro instance (213mb of RAM and dismal
performance), the price for a Small on-demand instance (1.3GB memory) is ~$54
per month. You save quite a bit by going with a reserved instance, where you
pay about $70 up-front but then your monthly instance price is almost halved,
coming in at around $32 per/mo.

Either way, it's going to be more cost-effective at a lower level to go with
something like Redis-to-go, Openredis, etc... if you need something simple.

Long story short, if you're on Heroku and (like me) were thinking/hoping that
this might be a nice alternative to the various add-ons available ... I don't
think that the juice is worth the squeeze. One, you have to administer and
maintain things yourself (which is trivial for something like this, so not a
big deal) but the pricing doesn't line up. The Redis providers leading the
market today are able to do so because they provision the heavy-hitter EC2
nodes and then chop them up.

It's important to note though you can get a free micro instance for a year on
the free usage tier. Micro's are like the section-8 housing of the server
world, but free is free and beggars can't be choosers ;)

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progx
The prices of many Redis-Service-Provider will drop rapidly after amazons
release ?

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svmegatron
Or they will all start making more money.

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AznHisoka
Of all the things that you can put to the cloud, I'm not sure why people would
want a cloud-hosted memory store. It's easy as heck to set it up in your own
server, probably costs less to maintain and host, and faster too as it's
closer to your data centers.

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pashields
They handle automatic failover, which redis does not currently do out of the
box. That part is pretty cool. Maybe not worth the price, but definitely
useful.

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yesbabyyes
Actually, Redis has a pretty clever failover solution now, in redis-sentinel:
[http://redis.io/topics/sentinel](http://redis.io/topics/sentinel)

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ajtaylor
It was only a matter of time before they added Redis to the mix. Glad to see
it happening sooner rather than later though.

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werkshy
We just spent days moving stuff away from Elasticache due to memcached
limitations, and would love to have moved to managed Redis. We're an AWS
partner, with the highest level support contract and if we'd known two weeks
ago that this was in the pipeline, we would have waited. AWS, why don't you
give us any road map for stuff like this?

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tyw
yeah we recently migrated from memcached on elasticache to redis on EC2 (and
bought the reservations), though our migration rolled out about 4-6 weeks ago.
oh well, I guess.

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jamornh
According to this it should be quite easy to move your current redis on EC2
back to ElastiCache:

"Seamless Integration: If you are running Redis on EC2, you can transfer its
contents to a new Amazon ElastiCache for Redis node. You may also attach a
Redis node running on EC2 to an Amazon ElastiCache for Redis node."[1]

... at least after your reservations run out.

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-
new/2013/09/04/amazon...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-
new/2013/09/04/amazon-elasticache-for-redis/)

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zwily
Looks to me like this doesn't support more than one redis instance in a
cluster (to make a ring) - just replication groups. I'm guessing that's a
"TBD" thing. :(

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apu
Wow, this is yet another major step forward for redis adoption! Congrats to
antirez and the whole redis team!

