<p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">One of the main selling points of many social media platforms is that they can offer real-time communication without much lagging. Often, websites and applications require high-performance and high-speed access to data for caching and creating queues, which a platform facilitates. One such platform is Redis, which is an open-source data structure server primarily used as a database.</span></p><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Redis is one of the fastest servers that fetches your data lightning quick. What makes Redis so fast and accurate, and how does the platform work? </span></p><h2 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">What is Redis?</span></h2><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Redis stands for REmote DIctionary Server. In technical terms, it is an “open-source data server that stores data in memory” and belongs to the category of NoSQL databases. To simplify, Redis can be understood as a contact book, only in that Redis stores the data in terms of memory instead of disk or solid-state drive (which is how it is usually done).</span></p><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Since Redis stores data in memory, it is called an in-memory key/value store. The key/value concept is related to the data types supported by the server. As commonly understood, Keys are identifiers that carry a value of the data types. Redis supports different data types, including strings, linked lists, sets, etc.</span></p><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">One of the reasons why many popular platforms like Netflix, Pinterest, and Uber use Redis is because of how fast it is. Everywhere you go on the internet, you can see people exclaiming in disbelief about how quick the server can be. The next section discusses how Redis is so fast and the features that help Redis achieve an extremely efficient data retrieval system.</span></p><h2 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Why and How Redis is Fast</span></h2><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Not very surprisingly, there are multiple reasons as to why Redis is a popular choice among developers. Here are a few reasons that make the server quick and efficient.</span></p><h3 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">RAM Data Storage </span></h3><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Instead of storing data in an SSD or disk, Redis stores the data straight into the server's memory, the RAM. This is the primary reason explaining how Redis is so fast. The memory management in this platform is very structured as it is handled by its allocator. This allocator is custom-designed to handle specific types of data that Redis often handles.</span></p><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Since the data is structured in terms of strings, lists, sets, etc., it is very easy to read and write operations in the RAM. These data structures also come in handy in terms of different operations as they are optimized accordingly. As the process becomes simple and easy, the server is able to fetch data quickly and process requests at lightning speed.</span></p><h3 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Redis Persistence</span></h3><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Redis offers a special feature called persistence that stores data on the disk and is retrieved in case of a crash or an unexpected shutdown. There are two options in this feature: RDB (Redis Database Backup) persists your data in the disk in the form of snapshots, enabling faster loading when during restart; AOF (Applied Only File) saves every write command received by the Redis server.</span></p><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">In both cases, Redis persistence is an excellent feature that ensures that your data is stored safely, even in the case of inevitable crashes.</span></p><h3 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Optimized Commands </span></h3><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Redis contains a great set of built-in commands that are optimized for server performance. The execution of the commands also happens in a set cycle of time. Every Redis command is executed in constant time or, in some cases, logarithmic time relative to the number of elements in the process. Simply put, the entire operation stays quick and efficient even if the data set is quite large.</span></p><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">The optimized commands let you carry out various simple actions, such as adding elements in a set, finding and fetching values, etc. The commands are also quite simple, so they are very handy for developers to access the data quickly and easily.</span></p><h3 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Replication Strategies</span></h3><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">One of Redis's most useful features is its replication strategies. Redis allows its users to make multiple copies of their data sets so that they can access copies in case one of the servers is down. You can also find another special feature in Redis that facilitates better access to data. This is the clustering for horizontal scaling, where your data is distributed across multiple nodes. By facilitating replication strategies, Redis ensures high data availability and fault tolerance in the servers.</span></p><h3 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Ease of Access and Use </span></h3><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">One might think that since Redis has so many features, it will be tough to access and operate the server. However, Redis is a user-friendly platform that ensures ease of usage with its powerful built-in commands and client libraries. </span></p><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">The server is quite easy to set up for simple use cases such as cache management, and the platform also offers a vibrant environment that allows third-party integration.</span></p><h2 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Benefits of Using Redis</span></h2><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Apart from its ease of use and quick processing, Redis also features many other benefits. Some of the benefits of the platform are listed below.</span></p><ul><li><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;"><strong>Large Value Pairs</strong> - Redis allows the storage of individual value pairs as large as 512 MB, making it a great platform for storing large data sets.</span></li><li><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;"><strong>Client APIs in Different Programming Languages</strong> - Redis has developed client APIs in a wide range of programming languages such as Ruby, Java, C, and Python.</span></li><li><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;"><strong>Cache Loading</strong> - The server allows you to insert huge amounts of data in cache very easily - this process is called mass insertion and makes cache loading easy and quick. </span></li></ul><h2 style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">The Bottom Line</span></h2><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Redis is an in-memory, open-source platform that acts as a database server and cache management platform. It is considered one of the fastest servers in the world, and this is made possible by the detailed structure of Redis and its in-memory storage of data in RAM. </span></p><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Redis also boasts many favorable features, such as ease of usage, replication strategies, and improved command execution, which make it the perfect platform to handle large volumes of data. All these features make Redis a fast and efficient platform, making it a top choice for many organizations.</span></p><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Read More</span></p><p style="text-align:justify;"><a href="https://devopsden.io/article/what-is-helm">https://devopsden.io/article/what-is-helm</a></p><p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:Arial, sans-serif;">Follow us on</span></p><p style="text-align:justify;"><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/devopsden/">https://www.linkedin.com/company/devopsden/</a></p>
