Relish with Redis: NoSQL is mustard for microservices
As everybody knows, there’s no hot dogs, pretzels or pork roast without mustard.
Microservices, it has been suggested, also need a solid relish (and a bun backbone), without which they fail to be easily consumed.
A Redis Labs IDC ‘InfoBrief’ study (another name for a ‘survey’ presumably) named “The Impact of Application Modernisation on the Data Layer” suggests that nearly half of microservices applications rely on a database.
As many as 84% of technologists questioned said that using a key-value or NoSQL database for their microservices-based applications made the most sense. According to IDC’s suggested concepts here, 24% of microservice applications are considered to be business-critical, of which, 42% would directly result in revenue loss if they suffered downtime.
Impact on the data layer
IDC reminds us that the change of application architecture into microservices significantly impacts the data layer supporting these services. The company points out the obvious fact that a more distributed data layer naturally creates challenges around database deployment, workflows, management and differing requirements per service.
The analyst house thinks that orchestration, in particular with regards to database management (32% of respondents), is a top-three challenge for their microservices applications because of the limitations of many databases for the cloud-native era. This is reflected in 95% of respondents choosing for the technology profile and performance when selecting a database for their microservices applications.
In particular, key-value and NoSQL databases are being favored for the flexibility and responsiveness they can deliver for these services.
“Microservice architecture can be a game-changer to beat the competition to market and reduce barriers to an organisation’s cloud migration. While the IDC study validates that most enterprises have embraced microservices for mission-critical workloads, it also highlights their cognizance of the operational complexities, specifically at the data tier, when deploying them at scale,” said Allen Terleto, field CTO at Redis Labs.
Terleto contends that Redis Enterprise helps work in this space as it provides a cloud-native, multi-tenant, multi-model database platform that can offer performance, scalability, high-availability and business continuity.