How To Include Redis In Your Application Architecture

Summary The Redis database recently celebrated its 10th birthday. In that time it has earned a well-earned reputation for speed, reliability, and ease of use. Python developers are fortunate to have a well-built client in the form of redis-py to leverage it in their projects. In this episode Andy McCurdy and Dr. Christoph Zimmerman explain the ways that Redis can be used in your application architecture, how the Python client is built and maintained, and how to use it in your projects. Announcements Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. When you’re ready to launch your next app or want to try a project you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so take a look at our friends over at Linode. With 200 Gbit/s private networking, scalable shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40 Gbit/s public network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to scale up. 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Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Andy McCurdy and Christoph Zimmerman about the Redis database, and some of the various ways that it is used by Python developers Interview Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? Can you start by explaining what Redis is and how you got involved in the project? How does the redis-py project relate to the Redis database and what motivated you to create the Python client? What are some of the main use cases that Redis enables? Can you describe how Redis-py is implemented and some of the primitives that it provides for building applications on top of? How do the release cycles of redis-py and the Redis database relate to each other? How closely does redis-py match the features of the Redis database? What are some of the convenience methods or features that you have added to make the client more Pythonic? Redis is often used as a key/value cache for web applications, in some cases replacing Memcached. What are the characteristics of Redis that lend themselves well to this purpose? What are some edge cases or gotchas that users should be aware of? What are some of the common points of confusion or difficulties when storing and retrieving values in Redis? What have been some of the most challenging aspects of building and maintaining the Redis Python client? What are some of the anti-patterns that you have seen around how developers build on top of Redis? What are some of the most interesting or unexpected ways that you have seen Redis used? What are some of the least used or most misunderstood features of Redis that you think developers should know about? What are some of the recent and near-future improvements or features in Redis that you are most excited by? Keep In Touch Andy @andymccurdy on Twitter andymccurdy on GitHub Christoph chrisAtRedis on GitHub LinkedIn Picks Tobias Rowan Atkinson Andy The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt Dota 2 Auto Chess (Community Mod) Christoph IPA Infused With Grapefruit Juice redis-py Selenium Python client Daniel Suarez Influx Links redis-py Redis DB Redis Labs PHP Django Reflective Operating System Architectures TCL Perl Linux Memcached NextCloud C programming language uWSGI Flask Gevent PyPy re-json redis-graph Redis-search MongoDB Bloom Filter hiredis Redis Sentinel HA plugin Lua programming language OpenWRT LuCI MicroPython Podcast Episode The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA