What this book covers

As you read Mastering Redis, two themes will emerge that parallel the development/operations dualism of the popular and trendy operations and processes, commonly known as DevOps. To help guide your approach to the material contained in the chapters, each chapter's topics will be identified as either software development or system operations focused. Due to the increasingly blurred line between the two, getting a topical understanding of the topics in each trend increases your and your team's abilities to quickly and efficiently develop and deploy Redis solutions for your project or as a piece of your technological infrastructure requirements.

In the following diagram, each chapter's horizontal position visually represents whether the topics weigh towards software development or systems operations:

DevOps Chapter Tracks

Chapter 1, Why Redis?, introduces the Redis development philosophy as articulated by Salvatore Sanfilippo, the founder and primary maintainer of Redis.

Chapter 2, Advanced Key Management and Data Structures, builds upon your basic knowledge of Redis by expanding and explaining Redis data structures and key management, including the important topic of constructing meaningful and expressive key schemas for your applications.

Chapter 3, Managing RAM – Tips and Techniques for Redis Memory Management, looks at the various options Redis provides to optimize the memory usage in your applications including Redis support for various caching and key eviction strategies based on Less Recently Used (LRU) implementations in Redis.

Chapter 4, Programming Redis Part One – Redis Core, Clients, and Languages, is an advanced topic on programming applications. This chapter starts with an overview of Redis's core C programming language implementation and includes an in-depth examination of selected C code snippets to deepen your knowledge of Redis. It continues with how to use three different Redis clients, with short programming exercises in Python, Node.js, and Haskell.

Chapter 5, Programming Redis Part Two – Lua Scripting, Administration, and DevOps, is an advanced topic on programming applications. It starts with an overview of Redis server-side Lua scripting and how to use Lua more effectively with Redis. The chapter next expands on a few popular programming design patterns with Redis, with specific examples of how different people and companies have used these patterns in their operations. This chapter ends with how Redis is used in typical DevOps scenarios from the perspective of a software developer.

Chapter 6, Scaling with Redis Cluster and Sentinel, explores two relatively recent additions to Redis—Redis Cluster and Redis Sentinel. Redis Sentinel is a special high-availability mode for monitoring the health of masters and slaves, along with the ability to switch if a failure occurs in any master or slave Redis instance. Redis Cluster, mentioned previously, is now a production-ready way to store large amounts of data that may be too big to fit into the memory of a single machine, by running multiple Redis instances through key sharding. While these topics have more of an operational focus, engineering solutions with Redis should, at the minimum, know the benefits and limitations of how to use Redis Cluster.

Chapter 7, Redis and Complementary NoSQL Technologies, starts with the recognition that for most organizations, their information technology stack includes a heterogeneous mixture of different types of data and processing solutions. Redis is an ideal way to extend the functionality of other NoSQL data storages options, and in this chapter, we'll see how Redis can be used with MongoDB, ElasticSearch, and Fedora Digital Repository. This chapter should be of interest to both developers and system administrators who may need to develop and support complex business requirements with multiple solutions.

Chapter 8, Docker Containers and Cloud Deployments, shows how using Redis as in Docker containers and images can simplify management and improve security and reliability of your Redis solutions. Docker is an open source container technology for applications that is rapidly being adopted by many enterprises. Building upon Docker with Redis, we'll then examine specific challenges of using Redis on the most popular computing cloud providers starting the largest and most established, Amazon Web Services, followed by Google's Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure, with special attention to other cloud service providers such as Rackspace and Digital Ocean. We'll finish the chapter by examining Redis's offerings of specialized cloud services that focus on hosting and managing your Redis instances.

Chapter 9, Task Management and Messaging Queuing, begins with an in-depth exploration of Redis Pub/Sub commands. This involves first looking at various examples of how publishers and consumers can communicate between different processes, programs, Redis clients, operating systems, and remote computers. Further in the chapter, we'll expand upon Redis Pub/Sub and look more generally at using Redis as a messaging queue between different layers in an enterprise computing ecosystem. This chapter ends by wrapping up all the concepts through a detailed example of using Redis with Celery as task management and a messaging queue with Pub/Sub support.

Chapter 10, Measuring and Managing Information Streams, builds upon the previous chapter's concepts to show how Redis is be used as a real-time data aggregator for disparate data streams of various technology systems used within an organization. We'll then examine the Redis security model and new security features with the latest version Redis. A web-based, operational dashboard will visualize the incoming data flows into Redis using our knowledge of Redis clients. Next, we'll show how to apply machine learning algorithms, such as Naive Bayes, to these Redis-based information flows to provide a richer snapshot and deepen your understanding of the operations occurring within an organization or department.

Appendix, Sources, acknowledges the source of extracts used in the chapters and presents links chapter-wise for further reading.