Developing Modern Use Cases with Redis Stack

Redis Stack can be used in many different scenarios. While Redis is traditionally used as an in-memory real-time cache and as a session store, or it can be used to store leaderboards or act as a message broker using different core data structures, Redis Stack extends Redis’s well-known features, thus becoming a flexible solution to many emerging problems. In this chapter, we will present an overview of the traditional use cases so that you will find solutions to classical problems. We will focus on the new use cases that are possible using Redis Stack’s multi-model capabilities.

In this chapter, you will learn how Redis Stack can prevent denial-of-service (DoS) attacks or spot attempts of fraud, thus helping secure the stability of an application and the confidentiality of data. You will also discover how to track the nearest available bikes of the urban bike-sharing service and how to efficiently count all the user authentications...

Technical requirements

To follow along with the examples in the chapter, you will need to install Redis Stack Server 7.2 or a later version on your development environment. Alternatively, you can create a free Redis Cloud subscription to get a free plan and use a managed Redis Stack database.

Caching, rate-limiting, geo-positioning, and other Redis traditional use cases

Implementing the many use cases that companies demand from their technical staff requires a technological stack and a competence development plan to sustain the efforts of designing, implementing, testing, and maintaining a solution. Evaluating and benchmarking the different options is time-consuming, and introducing a new technology demands processes and often increases the time to market for new features and products, thus slowing down the innovation and competitiveness of a company. Redis Stack is often regarded as a Swiss Army knife when it comes to solving different problems. As a data structures server, it allows you to transfer many responsibilities from application servers or specialized databases to a single, compact database server. In this section, we will recap the classical use cases that made Redis popular. Those uses include the following:

• Caching
• Session store
• Rate limiter...

Going beyond the real-time cache with Redis Stack

With the addition of new capabilities, Redis Stack pushes Redis forward and meets the expectations of software architects and developers who are having to deal with myriad new requirements. However, it also pushes the old traditional ones to the next step, which means finding new ways to resolve traditional problems with real-time performance, scalability, and high availability easily and inexpensively. Since its inception, Redis’ objective has been to provide suitable data structures and algorithms to ensure speed and minimal footprint. As an example, think of the Bitmap data structure, which grants access down to the bit level. With such flexibility, we can flag the days in a given month when a user has authenticated to a certain service:

127.0.0.1:6379> SETBIT user:032023 0 1
(integer) 0
127.0.0.1:6379> SETBIT user:032023 5 1
(integer) 0
127.0.0.1:6379> SETBIT user:032023 10 1
(integer) 0
127.0.0.1:6379> SETBIT...

Designing microservice architectures with Redis Stack

Microservice architecture is a system design pattern that promotes subdividing large services into smaller units by decomposing the business logic into decoupled and independent services, each depending on the preferred technology stack, languages data models, and more. These services take the name of microservices and, communicating over a network, deliver the functionality of a larger system.

In this section, we will introduce some of the principal patterns for microservice architectures. These patterns are guidelines for designing, developing, and deploying microservices. We will approach this subject by presenting the value that the capabilities of Redis Stack provide at the time of choosing the suitable technology for the implementation. In this section, we will discuss the following patterns:

• API gateway
• API gateway caching
• Domain-driven design
• Query caching
• Command query responsibility segregation...

Summary

In this chapter, we reviewed the common scenarios Redis is known for: a real-time store for caching, a compact session store, a flexible message broker, and more. We also introduced modern use cases that can be implemented using the capabilities of Redis Stack. You learned about the indexing features to implement a faceted search in an online retail store and the convenience of indexing a dataset partially. You also discovered how to work with unstructured data to implement a recommendation system based on VSS or to serve an ML pipeline when Redis Stack is used as an online feature store. Finally, you explored microservice architecture patterns and learned how to implement them with Redis Stack.

In Chapter 3, Getting Started with Redis Stack, you will learn how to install Redis Stack on different environments using binary packages, Docker images, and more. You will also prepare your environment so that you can work with the client libraries for the desired programming language...