The Hidden Costs of Redis

by Chai Bhat Redis has been one of the most popular in-memory key-value stores according to Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey. The popularity of open source Redis can be attributed to the perception that Redis is a “low cost” alternative to commercial software. While the software is free to download and use, the true costs of running Redis in a production environment are unfortunately not realized in the first few months. However, as companies grow, so does their data — as well as their performance requirements – and that is when Redis runs into speed bumps. We see numerous companies running into issues with Redis at scale, where there is a significant drop in performance, and hardware costs begin to pile up. Redis is also much harder to use at scale; no transaction support across shards being the primary issue.