In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced a new partnership with Redis (formerly known as Redis Labs) to deliver Redis Enterprise as newly, fully integrated tiers of Azure Cache for Redis. The enhanced service offering, currently in private preview, will provide customers with two new Enterprise tiers – which include Redis on Flash, modules, and the ability to create an active geo-redundant cache for hybrid-cloud architectures in the future.
Microsoft started their collaboration with Redis Labs back in 2014 with the launch of Redis Cloud on Azure. Since then the service has evolved with updates such as geo-replication support and reserved-capacity. Now, the public cloud vendor incorporates two existing offerings of Redis Labs as additional Enterprise tiers in Azure Redis Cache service providing customers with more features, higher availability, and security capabilities.
Ofer Bengal, CEO and co-founder of Redis Labs, wrote in his blog post on the new partnership announcement:
Throughout the development process, three key customer drivers were consistently top of mind: improve developer productivity, ensure operational resiliency, and ease cloud migration. Teams at both organizations were committed to building an integration that delivers these values to our customers. With the announcement of Redis Enterprise integration into Azure Cache for Redis, we meet these needs.
With the new tiers, developers can use the most up-to-date version of Redis, including its native data structures, probabilistic data structures, streams, time-series, and search data models. Furthermore, they can benefit from the native integration with other Azure services, and easily deploy a Redis cluster and scale to terabyte-sized data sets at the cost of a disk-based data store by utilizing Redis on Flash technology. Also, with the added support of the Redis modules
RediSearch, RedisTimeSeries, and RedisBloom developers can build applications for a wide variety of use cases with a single technology.
Source: https://redislabs.com/redis-enterprise/technology/redis-enterprise-cluster-architecture/
Next to the benefits for developers, customers who wish to leverage the new tiers can rely on additional uptime through Redis Enterprise’s active geo-replication technology, and support for network isolation. Also, customers can reduce the total cost of ownership by scaling how much Redis they need in real-time with consumption-based pricing and see the consumption on the monthly Azure bill.
Julia Liuson, corporate vice president, developer division, wrote in the announcement blog post:
We’ve seen tremendous adoption of Azure Cache for Redis, our managed solution built on open source Redis, as Azure customers have leveraged Redis performance as a distributed cache, session store, and message broker. The incorporation of the Redis Labs Redis Enterprise technology extends the range of use cases in which developers can utilize Redis, while providing enhanced operational resiliency and security.
Lastly, Luison stated that the public preview would be available later this year. Furthermore, details of the Enterprise Tiers of Azure Cache for Redis are available on the Azure Marketplace page.