Summary

In this chapter, we have summarized the evolution of the programmability features of Redis, since the first Lua scripting feature was added in Redis 2.6.0, passing through the introduction of Redis functions in Redis 7, up to the most recent additions to Redis Stack – the introduction of the V8 engine and the ability to write JavaScript functions.

While Lua scripts and functions (which allow complex actions as close to the data as possible to be written) are of great value to developers, JavaScript functions and the asynchronous nature of the V8 engine provide an unprecedented capability to offload part of the processing load to coroutines, while preserving a single-threaded data access model, which is the distinguishing feature of the Redis Server architecture. In addition, the support for clustered environments with remote functions expands the manageability of data when working with sharded databases. Finally, the real-time stream processing capability of Redis...