8 ms·

Redis To Go is shutting down

66 points by captn3m0 4y ago

ing33k 4y ago
Back in 2012-2013 my first real idea was to provide redis as a service , even got a domain and a basic MVP. Mailed heroku folks about listing this as an addon. We never heard back from them and I moved on to other ideas. I was glad to see redistogo back then execute successfully. It's s different game now.
julianbuse 4y ago
> We wanted to communicate this as early as possible Two months is a bit short for a database change, don't you think?
- calgoo 4y ago
  Especially in summer! I can imagine that there are quite a few people who will have to change their vacation plans.
  - heretogetout 4y ago
    Moving to a new instance of ought to be trivial -- send writes to both for a while, once the latest ttl is hit move reads. This does assume you're doing something same like setting short ttls (no more than a day, maybe a week).
    - yashap 4y ago
      Redis isn’t used exclusively as a cache. It’s used a lot as a job queue, as an event bus, for session storage, etc. Some even use it as a core source of truth database, though this is rarely a good idea IMO.
      - heretogetout 4y ago
        I think each of those is nearly as easy to update, except the source of truth. Probably shouldn't ever go on vacation if redis is your source of truth!
        yashap 4y ago
        Yeah, agreed, though if you’re using Redis as central pub/sub infra in an environment with tonnes of different services who produce and consume events, a migration can get tedious. Certainly not as bad as traditional DB migrations, but doing it under a short timespan could still be a pain.
      - RulerOf 4y ago
        The first thing that comes to my mind when I see a Redis instance is "how do I flush it?"
- zeckalpha 4y ago
  Redis is not a database. Please, do not use it for persistence. I have been bitten too many times by services that tried.
  - avinassh 4y ago
    I am curious, what all kinds of issues you ran into?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - zeckalpha 4y ago
      Data loss, particularly under high write volume. Partitioning can help. There are a few ways to enable persistence, but you should still treat it like a cache, like you would Memcache or Elasticsearch.
captn3m0 4y ago
Owned by Rackspace since 2013[1], heavily used by Heroku apps[2], which calls it "#1 Redis Provider with over 50,000 Redis instances."[2] Surprising that while Heroku sent a mail,it hasn't updated the Devcenter[2], or Elements[3] listing to note down the EOL. [1]: https://www.theregister.com/2013/03/28/rackspace_grabs_redis_via_exceptional_cloud_services/ https://www.theregister.com/2013/03/28/rackspace_grabs_redis... [2]: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/redistogo https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/redistogo [3]: https://elements.heroku.com/addons/redistogo https://elements.heroku.com/addons/redistogo
- dubcanada 4y ago
  I have a funny feel Heroku is in maintenance mode. It seems to be getting pushed aside at Salesforce.
  - jmuguy 4y ago
    I'm definitely getting worried about that. Our CTO has always said we'd move off Heroku when we got big enough, which makes sense, but now I'm afraid we're going to be doing it in a hurry when Heroku stops caring about some aspect of their service we depend on. We're already sort of seeing that in a niche case - it used to be that credentials to access Heroku's PG databases were created with readonly permissions by default. That has been broken for some time, forcing you to connect to the PG instance and run the necessary SQL commands to provide access. Not a big deal but just another indication to me that the lights are on but no one is home.
    - brianwawok 4y ago
      How much Heroku specific stuff are you using? Wouldn't be a bad idea to maybe spend one cycle every few projects to remove a piece of that and switch to "standard" stuff. The actual dev-ops stuff isn't hard, k8s does it out of the box and has multiple providers. Should save you 75% of your hosting bill, which may or may not matter dependign on your scale.
      - deleted 4y ago
sleepyhead 4y ago
They could not find anyone to buy it and migrate customers away from the platform? Surely someone would be interested to purchase?
- wut42 4y ago
  They (Rackspace) OWNS another Redis hosting platform: https://www.objectrocket.com/managed-redis/ https://www.objectrocket.com/managed-redis/. It's ridiculous that they didn't migrate customers instead of closing up with a two months notice in the summer.
  - nik736 4y ago
    Weird, maybe they want to get rid of the free tier?
    - captn3m0 4y ago
      They could have migrated paying customers, but didn’t.
    - wut42 4y ago
      They could have migrated customers while saying EOL to the free tier. I'm more inclined to think that they had two Redis SaaS offerings and the one who was less used/less maintained lost the internal battle.
iamricks 4y ago
I kind of predicted this in my SO post in 2019 [1]. They were falling behind for a while. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/58737548/6460122 https://stackoverflow.com/a/58737548/6460122
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Wow, RTG was killed by Sidekiq requiring Redis 4. Not the first company killed by the upgrade treadmill I'm sure. People should be on the lookout for projects like Sidekiq that force upgrades, and push back on them and/or volunteer to help make it backward-compatible and/or hard-fork it if the devs won't agree to it. Here's how that works: 1. You see an announcement. "Foobar 2.0 requires Bazz 4.x" 2. You make a friendly suggestion that they not break backward compatibility with Bazz 3.x 3. If that fails, you volunteer to maintain backward compat yourself. 4. If they reject your patches, you hard fork Foobar and try to kill the original project, as they are clearly not good open-source citizens and must be replaced.
  - wut42 4y ago
    Are they really not "good open-source citizens" ? Keeping backwards compatibility doesn't mean a project is healthy, far from it. Volunteering to maintain backward compat. It can be very damaging in an open-source project. So let's admit you become the "redis 3.x" guy for Sidekiq. Now, every time the sidekiq project moves or tries to moves forward, they have to see with you to maintain compatibility ? Do they know you ? Are you already a contributor ? Also, who really needs to stay on Redis 3 there ? Are we blaming Sidekiq for killing RedisToGo, A RackSpace company, because they didn't "have the time" to upgrade to redis 4 ? Sounds like business needs. Business needs are rarely good open-source citizens.
    - phendrenad2 4y ago
      > Keeping backwards compatibility doesn't mean a project is healthy, far from it How does backward compatibility mean a project is unhealthy? > Do they know you ? Are you already a contributor ? How is someone who shows up and volunteers to help not a contributor by default? > because they didn't "have the time" to upgrade to redis 4 Time is money, and when you reach a certain amount of money, your business stops being profitable. So yes, presumably they literally didn't have "time" to do so.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hgazx 4y ago
I don't want to sound like "that guy" but what are the advantages of using this service instead of running Redis locally? Redis seems easy to run and maintain (unlike most rdbms which are quite complex and can fail or get corrupted in unexpected ways) and the latency difference of running locally instead of in a SaaS seems a no-brainer.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Quite a few people used it as a Heroku add-on, where self-hosting isn't an option due to dyno restarts and lack of persistent storage. https://elements.heroku.com/addons/redistogo https://elements.heroku.com/addons/redistogo
  - hgazx 4y ago
    Ah, I understand that it had a free tier. Now I get it. You can’t beat free :P
    - glenngillen 4y ago
      No, the OP is correct. If you’re all in on Heroku then there is no “run redis yourself locally option”. It can’t run in a dyno, you couldn’t use it to reliably persist state across your dynos. It’s nothing to do with it having a free plan.
      - mbreese 4y ago
        The “free” part answers the obvious follow up question of why the shutdown of this Redis SaaS provider is noteworthy. It’s highly used with Heroku because of the free tier. Even the notice mentions this, emphasizing that the alternatives they recommend don’t have a free tier.
        BigglesZX 4y ago
        Heroku's own redis addon[1] has a comparable free tier and while I can't be certain, I'm pretty sure it's been beefed up recently, as I just had to migrate away from RedisToGo and I would have chosen Heroku's own addon over RedisToGo originally unless there was a compelling reason not to. [1] https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-redis https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-redis
syastrov 4y ago
For context: Heroku also has their own Redis add on.
nicoburns 4y ago
I feel like a hosted Redis instance doesn't offer much unless you're using Redis for persistent data, which I suspect is a small proportion of the total number of Redis installs. Running Redis on a regular compute instance is easy!
- jaywalk 4y ago
  For smaller operations that don't have "cattle" VMs, hosted Redis gives you the same upside as every other hosted service, which is that you're not adding additional VMs to maintain.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    If you host on a service like Heroku, fly.io, or any service that supports container based hosting then you just point it at the Redis docker image and you're done. At most "maintenance" would consist of a cronjob to make it redeploy on a regular schedule (which would automatically deploy the latest version if you pick your docker base image correctly).
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
Used this a lot before the Heroku official Redis provider went online. Kinda wonder why Heroku didn't just buy them?
melony 4y ago
Upstash developer evangelists where art thou? Come quickly, everyone’s waiting for you! https://upstash.com https://upstash.com
enesakar 4y ago
There is Upstash! Per request pricing. Built-in REST API. Global replication.
dev_ilter 4y ago
Well, there is Upstash you can try
chronark 4y ago
Try out upstash, it offers serverless redis where pricing scales to zero.

66 points by captn3m0 4y ago

Back in 2012-2013 my first real idea was to provide redis as a service , even got a domain and a basic MVP. Mailed heroku folks about listing this as an addon. We never heard back from them and I moved on to other ideas. I was glad to see redistogo back then execute successfully. It's s different game now.

julianbuse 4y ago

> We wanted to communicate this as early as possible Two months is a bit short for a database change, don't you think?

calgoo 4y ago
Especially in summer! I can imagine that there are quite a few people who will have to change their vacation plans.
- heretogetout 4y ago
  Moving to a new instance of ought to be trivial -- send writes to both for a while, once the latest ttl is hit move reads. This does assume you're doing something same like setting short ttls (no more than a day, maybe a week).
  - yashap 4y ago
    Redis isn’t used exclusively as a cache. It’s used a lot as a job queue, as an event bus, for session storage, etc. Some even use it as a core source of truth database, though this is rarely a good idea IMO.
    - heretogetout 4y ago
      I think each of those is nearly as easy to update, except the source of truth. Probably shouldn't ever go on vacation if redis is your source of truth!
      - yashap 4y ago
        Yeah, agreed, though if you’re using Redis as central pub/sub infra in an environment with tonnes of different services who produce and consume events, a migration can get tedious. Certainly not as bad as traditional DB migrations, but doing it under a short timespan could still be a pain.
    - RulerOf 4y ago
      The first thing that comes to my mind when I see a Redis instance is "how do I flush it?"
zeckalpha 4y ago
Redis is not a database. Please, do not use it for persistence. I have been bitten too many times by services that tried.
- avinassh 4y ago
  I am curious, what all kinds of issues you ran into?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - zeckalpha 4y ago
    Data loss, particularly under high write volume. Partitioning can help. There are a few ways to enable persistence, but you should still treat it like a cache, like you would Memcache or Elasticsearch.

captn3m0 4y ago

Owned by Rackspace since 2013[1], heavily used by Heroku apps[2], which calls it "#1 Redis Provider with over 50,000 Redis instances."[2] Surprising that while Heroku sent a mail,it hasn't updated the Devcenter[2], or Elements[3] listing to note down the EOL. [1]: https://www.theregister.com/2013/03/28/rackspace_grabs_redis_via_exceptional_cloud_services/ https://www.theregister.com/2013/03/28/rackspace_grabs_redis... [2]: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/redistogo https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/redistogo [3]: https://elements.heroku.com/addons/redistogo https://elements.heroku.com/addons/redistogo

dubcanada 4y ago
I have a funny feel Heroku is in maintenance mode. It seems to be getting pushed aside at Salesforce.
- jmuguy 4y ago
  I'm definitely getting worried about that. Our CTO has always said we'd move off Heroku when we got big enough, which makes sense, but now I'm afraid we're going to be doing it in a hurry when Heroku stops caring about some aspect of their service we depend on. We're already sort of seeing that in a niche case - it used to be that credentials to access Heroku's PG databases were created with readonly permissions by default. That has been broken for some time, forcing you to connect to the PG instance and run the necessary SQL commands to provide access. Not a big deal but just another indication to me that the lights are on but no one is home.
  - brianwawok 4y ago
    How much Heroku specific stuff are you using? Wouldn't be a bad idea to maybe spend one cycle every few projects to remove a piece of that and switch to "standard" stuff. The actual dev-ops stuff isn't hard, k8s does it out of the box and has multiple providers. Should save you 75% of your hosting bill, which may or may not matter dependign on your scale.
    - deleted 4y ago

sleepyhead 4y ago

They could not find anyone to buy it and migrate customers away from the platform? Surely someone would be interested to purchase?

wut42 4y ago
They (Rackspace) OWNS another Redis hosting platform: https://www.objectrocket.com/managed-redis/ https://www.objectrocket.com/managed-redis/. It's ridiculous that they didn't migrate customers instead of closing up with a two months notice in the summer.
- nik736 4y ago
  Weird, maybe they want to get rid of the free tier?
  - captn3m0 4y ago
    They could have migrated paying customers, but didn’t.
  - wut42 4y ago
    They could have migrated customers while saying EOL to the free tier. I'm more inclined to think that they had two Redis SaaS offerings and the one who was less used/less maintained lost the internal battle.

iamricks 4y ago

I kind of predicted this in my SO post in 2019 [1]. They were falling behind for a while. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/58737548/6460122 https://stackoverflow.com/a/58737548/6460122

phendrenad2 4y ago
Wow, RTG was killed by Sidekiq requiring Redis 4. Not the first company killed by the upgrade treadmill I'm sure. People should be on the lookout for projects like Sidekiq that force upgrades, and push back on them and/or volunteer to help make it backward-compatible and/or hard-fork it if the devs won't agree to it. Here's how that works: 1. You see an announcement. "Foobar 2.0 requires Bazz 4.x" 2. You make a friendly suggestion that they not break backward compatibility with Bazz 3.x 3. If that fails, you volunteer to maintain backward compat yourself. 4. If they reject your patches, you hard fork Foobar and try to kill the original project, as they are clearly not good open-source citizens and must be replaced.
- wut42 4y ago
  Are they really not "good open-source citizens" ? Keeping backwards compatibility doesn't mean a project is healthy, far from it. Volunteering to maintain backward compat. It can be very damaging in an open-source project. So let's admit you become the "redis 3.x" guy for Sidekiq. Now, every time the sidekiq project moves or tries to moves forward, they have to see with you to maintain compatibility ? Do they know you ? Are you already a contributor ? Also, who really needs to stay on Redis 3 there ? Are we blaming Sidekiq for killing RedisToGo, A RackSpace company, because they didn't "have the time" to upgrade to redis 4 ? Sounds like business needs. Business needs are rarely good open-source citizens.
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    > Keeping backwards compatibility doesn't mean a project is healthy, far from it How does backward compatibility mean a project is unhealthy? > Do they know you ? Are you already a contributor ? How is someone who shows up and volunteers to help not a contributor by default? > because they didn't "have the time" to upgrade to redis 4 Time is money, and when you reach a certain amount of money, your business stops being profitable. So yes, presumably they literally didn't have "time" to do so.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hgazx 4y ago

I don't want to sound like "that guy" but what are the advantages of using this service instead of running Redis locally? Redis seems easy to run and maintain (unlike most rdbms which are quite complex and can fail or get corrupted in unexpected ways) and the latency difference of running locally instead of in a SaaS seems a no-brainer.

ceejayoz 4y ago
Quite a few people used it as a Heroku add-on, where self-hosting isn't an option due to dyno restarts and lack of persistent storage. https://elements.heroku.com/addons/redistogo https://elements.heroku.com/addons/redistogo
- hgazx 4y ago
  Ah, I understand that it had a free tier. Now I get it. You can’t beat free :P
  - glenngillen 4y ago
    No, the OP is correct. If you’re all in on Heroku then there is no “run redis yourself locally option”. It can’t run in a dyno, you couldn’t use it to reliably persist state across your dynos. It’s nothing to do with it having a free plan.
    - mbreese 4y ago
      The “free” part answers the obvious follow up question of why the shutdown of this Redis SaaS provider is noteworthy. It’s highly used with Heroku because of the free tier. Even the notice mentions this, emphasizing that the alternatives they recommend don’t have a free tier.
      - BigglesZX 4y ago
        Heroku's own redis addon[1] has a comparable free tier and while I can't be certain, I'm pretty sure it's been beefed up recently, as I just had to migrate away from RedisToGo and I would have chosen Heroku's own addon over RedisToGo originally unless there was a compelling reason not to. [1] https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-redis https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-redis

syastrov 4y ago

For context: Heroku also has their own Redis add on.

nicoburns 4y ago

I feel like a hosted Redis instance doesn't offer much unless you're using Redis for persistent data, which I suspect is a small proportion of the total number of Redis installs. Running Redis on a regular compute instance is easy!

jaywalk 4y ago
For smaller operations that don't have "cattle" VMs, hosted Redis gives you the same upside as every other hosted service, which is that you're not adding additional VMs to maintain.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  If you host on a service like Heroku, fly.io, or any service that supports container based hosting then you just point it at the Redis docker image and you're done. At most "maintenance" would consist of a cronjob to make it redeploy on a regular schedule (which would automatically deploy the latest version if you pick your docker base image correctly).

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

Used this a lot before the Heroku official Redis provider went online. Kinda wonder why Heroku didn't just buy them?

melony 4y ago

Upstash developer evangelists where art thou? Come quickly, everyone’s waiting for you! https://upstash.com https://upstash.com

enesakar 4y ago

There is Upstash! Per request pricing. Built-in REST API. Global replication.

dev_ilter 4y ago

Well, there is Upstash you can try

chronark 4y ago

Try out upstash, it offers serverless redis where pricing scales to zero.