Amazon ElastiCache - Now With a Dash of Redis • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon ElastiCache - Now With a Dash of Redis

#31

Post by jamornh » Wed, Sep 04, 2013, 6:51 PM UTC

tyw wrote: post #6

werkshy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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...

Re: Amazon ElastiCache - Now With a Dash of Redis

#32

Post by aioprisan » Wed, Sep 04, 2013, 7:08 PM UTC

pashields wrote: post #15

AznHisoka wrote: post #5

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.

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.

redis sentinel is out in the latest stable release and was out in the dev branch for the past year

Re: Amazon ElastiCache - Now With a Dash of Redis

#33

Post by andrewguenther » Wed, Sep 04, 2013, 7:14 PM UTC

whalesalad wrote: post #10

derefr wrote: post #4

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

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…

I will never ever use Redis-to-go again. Our instance was down for almost a week before we even heard a peep from customer service.

Re: Amazon ElastiCache - Now With a Dash of Redis

#34

Post by level09 » Wed, Sep 04, 2013, 8:38 PM UTC

j_baker wrote: post #23

level09 wrote: post #14

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

Two things: 1. What kind of EC2 instance are we talking about for MongoDB? If you're not using an SSD, comparing Dynamo and Mongo wouldn't be an apples-to-apples comparison. 2. I buy that the strictly technical costs of these systems is lower, but I'm not certain I buy that the overall cost (including engineer time to set these services up and monitor them) is lower.

1. With a provisioned iops the performance is almost identical to SSD, but yes probably I haven't done a side-to-side technical comparison. I only wanted to point out that I replaced one with the other and I had a good cut in cost.

2. Maybe it is just me, but I really think that some services like mongodb/redis does not require a big amount of system administration work to setup, I have actually wrote many python scripts to automate most of these tasks. but again maybe this depends on the country and the IT culture.

Re: Amazon ElastiCache - Now With a Dash of Redis

#35

Post by bowlofpetunias » Wed, Sep 04, 2013, 8:52 PM UTC

level09 wrote: post #14

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

Based on personal experience, I found that paying for the setup, tuning and 24/7 maintenance of a dedicated is way more expensive than using those service.

But I'm one of those crazy people who considers their time and that worth something.

Excuse the snark, but these arguments just keep repeating themselves. There's a reason they're called "services". It's like saying "it's cheaper to slaughter your own cow than to eat at a restaurant".

Re: Amazon ElastiCache - Now With a Dash of Redis

#36

Post by Goranek » Wed, Sep 04, 2013, 9:16 PM UTC

andrewvc wrote: post #27

nostromo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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…

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.

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

Re: Amazon ElastiCache - Now With a Dash of Redis

#37

Post by andresdouglas » Wed, Sep 04, 2013, 9:47 PM UTC

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/. 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.

Re: Amazon ElastiCache - Now With a Dash of Redis

#38

Post by simonebrunozzi » Wed, Sep 04, 2013, 10:45 PM UTC

level09 wrote: post #14

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

I think you wanted to say "on an EC2 machine", instead of "dedicated machine". Otherwise, people might think you're referring to physical hardware.

Re: Amazon ElastiCache - Now With a Dash of Redis

#39

Post by natmaster » Wed, Sep 04, 2013, 11:11 PM UTC

whalesalad wrote: post #10

derefr wrote: post #4

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

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…

I got $16.5 per month rate for 1 year of a small (which is 1.7gb).

This is dedicated performance, as opposed to the bad performance of a shared system like openredis, which is $25 a month for a small (200mb). (These systems put artificial limits on things like # of ports, etc. They also share with neighbors as you say, which makes them less reliable in performance - noisy neighbor problem.)

So unless you only need 25mb of cache and have very little load, EC2 is significantly cheaper.

Re: Amazon ElastiCache - Now With a Dash of Redis

#40

Post by bdcravens » Thu, Sep 05, 2013, 2:50 AM UTC

level09 wrote: post #14

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

If you have the staff, I definitely can see this. For a small team (in my case, 2) RDS was a no brainer. More than anything, letting Amazon handle backups was a big win. However, in a use case where you need more control (I realize you can ssh/rdp in, but there are limited configuration options) or more performance (the highest performing instance types aren't available) or flexibility (for SQL Server, you can't perform the full range of import, etc activities due to permissions), RDS may not be the best fit.