Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced the general availability of Amazon MemoryDB for Redis, a managed in-memory database that promises to simplify application development projects.

Enterprise applications have different requirements when it comes to data access speeds. A revenue forecasting tool, for example, might take a few minutes to import the latest earnings figures from a company’s financial database. However, product recommendation engines require the ability to pull information about a customer’s shopping preferences in tens of milliseconds to quickly generate buying suggestions.

For recommendation engines and other applications that prioritize speedy data access, companies often set up a cache. The cache is an ultrafast software system that can fetch the information needed by a workload much faster than a regular database. The software most commonly used for this task is the open-source Redis system, after which AWS’ newly launched MemoryDB for Redis service is named.

Companies usually deploy their Redis cache together with a regular database. The database holds most of an application’s information and is responsible for ensuring that the information can be reliably recovered in the event of the outage. The cache, in turn, is kept synchronized with the database, storing only the records that the application needs to access quickly and fetching them on a moment’s notice when needed. 

The challenge for companies is that creating such a setup often requires a great deal of custom code. With MemoryDB for Redis, AWS is promising to reduce the need for custom code by removing the requirement to maintain separate database and cache environments. MemoryDB for Redis combines the features of a cache and a database in a single service, allowing companies to maintain just one data management system instead of two.

“More and more customers have told us they need an easier way to build modern applications with microservices, which demand both extreme performance and durability,” said Raju Gulabani, the vice president of databases and analytics at AWS. “With Amazon MemoryDB for Redis, customers can now simplify their architecture with a durable and ultra-fast in-memory database, free from the hassle of managing a separate cache, database, and the underlying infrastructure.”

MemoryDB for Redis facilitates high-speed access to records that need to be retrieved quickly by storing them in RAM. Traditional databases keep records in storage and move them to memory when they are needed. By keeping data in memory from the outset, MemoryDB for Redis skips the time-consuming step of retrieving information from storage and thereby speeds up computations.

Another key feature of the service is that it’s compatible with Redis. Companies can move existing applications built using Redis to MemoryDB for Redis without major code modifications, AWS says. By removing the need for code modifications, AWS can make it easier and thereby more compelling for companies to switch to its service.

But there are scenarios where Redis can still play an important role in enterprises’ application environments. 

MemoryDB for Redis can read, that is fetch, records for an application with latencies measured in microseconds. A microsecond is one millionth of a second. The service writes new records to the cache with a slightly higher latency of a few milliseconds, or thousandths of a second.

AWS’ managed version of Redis, which is called Amazon ElastiCache, in contrast provides microsecond latencies for both reads and writes. That means it’s a better option for certain applications that have particularly strict requirements when it comes to editing data quickly.

Image: AWS