We are not using Redis OSS, instead we implemented our own Redis server. Because it's not very possible to scale it without increasing the costs and also it would be very challenging to adapt serverless use cases.
Different from the Redis OSS, we are using a tiered storage model which keeps the hot entries in the memory and gradually offloads colder ones. Also we can migrate a Redis DB to a bigger machine in a few seconds when a database needs more resources. We will share more technical information about our architecture in Lambda Store blog.
but this sounds even worse to me. okay so you have API compat great, but now you have unproved code running under the hood wonderful.
We are not using shared Redis instances. We have our own Redis server implementation, which has a tiered storage model which keeps the hot entries in the memory to better utilize memory usage. Using this we can use smaller instances for the most of the time and migrate the Redis db to a bigger machine in a few seconds when needed.
This is not a selling point to me. When it comes to storage, I prefer experience over motivation, just like I prefer durability over speed (cough, MongoDB).
Otherwise though this looks pretty cool.
I do wonder what their scaling story looks like. How can they maintain a profit at such low prices and handle sudden load spikes?