GCP – Memorystore for Redis Cluster is GA and provides up to 60 times more throughput and microseconds latency

Since we launched Memorystore for Redis Cluster in preview, customers across a variety of industries including banking, retail, ads, manufacturing, and social media have taken advantage of the performance and scalability of Memorystore for Redis Cluster.

Today we’re thrilled to announce the general availability (GA) of Memorystore for Redis Cluster, providing a 99.99% SLA with replicas enabled. With Memorystore for Redis Cluster, you get a fully-managed and fully open-source software (OSS) compatible Redis Cluster offering with zero downtime scaling (in or out), providing up to 60 times more throughput than Memorystore for Redis, with microseconds latency. Memorystore for Redis Cluster intelligently places primaries and replica nodes across availability zones and manages automatic failovers to maximize availability and reduce complexity.

Performance sensitive customers like PLAID, Wright Flyer Studios, and Reddit are excited about this GA and the 99.99% SLA.

“Memorystore for Redis Cluster provides us the scalability and manageability required for our workloads, allowing us to use Memorystore in far more meaningful ways. The OSS cluster client compatibility also provides an easier migration path from existing self-managed Redis Clusters. Now that it is GA with a 99.99% SLA, we look forward to adopting it for our caching needs on Google Cloud!” – Stanley Feng, Senior Engineering Manager at Reddit

Performance and scaling

Memorystore for Redis Cluster takes Memorystore to the next level of scale and performance, supporting 10 times more data and providing up to 60 times more throughput than Memorystore for Redis, with microseconds latency. Memorystore’s vetted, production-ready infrastructure provides a pre-configured and optimal Redis platform to supercharge your performance. With zero downtime scaling, you can start small and grow over time, adding only the capacity required based on workload demands, without taking downtime and interrupting your production applications. Unlike client-sharded caching architectures, which are prone to data loss during scaling operations, the simple scaling APIs of Memorystore for Redis Cluster let you grow or shrink your clusters and optimize costs without data loss. The direct access (proxy-less) architecture of Memorystore for Redis Cluster ensures that throughput scales linearly as nodes are added to the cluster, providing ultra-low and predictable latencies and avoiding the cost and latency overhead of a proxy-based architecture.

Applibot, a CyberAgent company, produces and operates smartphone games and services, and depends heavily on Redis and its ultra-fast performance:

“After relying on Memorystore, we’re excited for the launch of Memorystore for Redis Cluster, which will dramatically improve performance with its ultra low and predictable latencies. We’re also very excited to take advantage of Memorystore for Redis Cluster’s easy-to-use APIs which make scaling clusters in or out simple, fast, and non-disruptive, enabling us to dynamically size the clusters based on workload demands.” – Naoto Ito, Lead of Backend Engineering at Applibot

High availability

Memorystore for Redis Cluster is built with a robust control plane that provides high availability with data replication across multiple fault-domains (zones), automatic failovers, and intelligent node placement for both primary and replica nodes. Memorystore for Redis Cluster can handle both node and zonal outages by efficiently failing over to the replica nodes, promoting them to become primaries, and automatically repairing failed nodes with seamless orchestration. Memorystore for Redis Cluster’s durable architecture is designed for reliability, as Redis clients directly access the shards (primary and replica nodes). This design avoids the risk of a single point of failure (as each shard is designed to fail independently), which is inherent in proxy-based architectures.

In addition, Memorystore for Redis Cluster’s control plane utilizes Create-Before-Destroy and graceful shutdown maintenance strategies to eliminate downtime or workload interruptions. Instead of upgrading active cluster nodes in-place, Memorystore first creates an entirely new replica with the new software (at no extra charges to you), then coordinates a lossless failover from the old node to the new node, and lastly removes the old node gracefully in a gradual process that ensures minimal-to-no impact to your application.

NTT DOCOMO, Japan’s largest telecommunications company, is thrilled with the general availability of Memorystore for Redis Cluster:

“Memorystore for Redis Cluster’s resilient design and 99.99% SLA gives us confidence that our clusters are durable and resilient. Memorystore’s sophisticated control plane and maintenance orchestration ensures minimal impact to our application during maintenance and we’re very excited to utilize this managed offering so we can focus our efforts on creating value for our customers.” – Masatoshi Kato, Manager, Service Design Department, NTT DOCOMO

Integrated and automated with Google Cloud

Memorystore for Redis Cluster is built with Private Service Connect (PSC) for private and secure connectivity by default. With PSC, we simplified the provisioning experience so you can easily configure private networking with an automated single-step process, avoid security issues of bidirectional access, and not be limited by the quota issues posed by Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) peering-based implementations. We also simplified cluster endpoint management by only requiring two IP addresses for any sized cluster (even for 250 Redis nodes!), thereby addressing IP exhaustion and contiguous expansion problems. With PSC, client applications can easily access the cluster from any region and there are advanced security controls available, like separation of permissions for Network and Redis admin and control of the IP address space used for cluster endpoints.

Memorystore for Redis Cluster comes with built-in integration with Google Identity and Access Management (IAM) so you can easily manage and control access to your clusters, especially for a microservice based client architecture. We also provide out of the box Audit Logging, in-transit encryption with TLS, and integration with Cloud Monitoring, so your cluster metrics are accessible and actionable.

Fully-managed vs do-it-yourself

For many customers, it’s the fully-managed nature of the Memorystore for Redis Cluster that entices them to migrate. You can offload the tedious and unrewarding work of tuning Redis performance on Compute Engine VMs, orchestrating complex cluster topologies, optimizing networking implementations, managing maintenance, and striving for self-managed high availability in the face of outages and upgrades. Customers can rely on Google to continually invest in building and supporting new Redis features and delivering them to customers with non-disruptive maintenance operations. Now, you can focus on building value for your organizations instead of focusing on managing Redis Clusters. To make adoption even more enticing, Memorystore Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) are already available for Memorystore for Redis Cluster and are fungible with Memorystore for Redis as well as Memorystore for Memcached, enabling savings of 40% with a three-year CUD and 20% with a one-year CUD.

Waze, a free navigation and driving app active in more than 185 countries is adopting Memorystore for Redis Cluster to take advantage of the fully-managed offering and supercharge their applications’ performance:

“Waze is excited to use Memorystore for Redis Cluster as our primary cache solution, taking advantage of the 99.99% SLA, zero-downtime scalability, and flexible Redis data types. The ultra-fast performance has been instrumental in helping us scale our platform and provide a better experience for our users.” – Yuval Kamran, DevOps Engineer

Getting started

At this point, you may be wondering how to get started or how much effort it would require to migrate to the Memorystore for Redis Cluster. Good news! We’ve already published a zero-downtime migration blog using OSS RIOT with code snippets and a detailed step-by-step walkthrough so you can quickly and easily migrate your Redis implementations from any source, including self-managed or third-party offerings without interrupting your applications.

You can easily get started today by heading over to the Cloud console and creating a cluster, and then scaling in or out with just a few clicks. Please let us know if you have any feedback by reaching out to us at cloud-memorystore-pm@google.com.