I wouldn't go as far as calling it scarcely usable, but EC2 does add some overhead to running redis. I've been using it on EC2 for over 2 years (some of the met

I wouldn't go as far as calling it scarcely usable, but EC2 does add some overhead to running redis. I've been using it on EC2 for over 2 years (some of the metrics in the doc you linked are on my machines BTW :) ), and you just have to find workarounds for persistence because of the high fork times - it adds a bit of complexity, but a dedicated slave for saving is not that big a deal, and can reside on the same instance as the master). We've recently moved to m3 instances and the problem has completely gone away, hopefully Amazon will migrate all instances to use HVM.