Use case
Migrating to AWS ElastiCache from
Self-Managed Redis in EKS
- Lakshya Chhajed
About the Customer
SkillForge is a talent accelerator that offers unique career growth opportunities for software developers worldwide. It focuses on cultivating talent, expanding skills, and maximizing career potential through a dynamic platform that supports developers at every stage of their learning.
Customer Challenge
The organization encountered challenges managing Redis on a self-hosted EKS cluster, specifically high memory usage that led to application pods failing when connected to the self-managed Redis at regular intervals.
Upon investigation, we found that the default maxmemory-policy was set to volatile-lru, resulting in consistently high memory utilization, highlighting the need for a strategic Redis migration.
Solution
To resolve these issues, we implemented a Redis migration to ElastiCache for Redis in AWS.
This Redis migration enabled us to set the maxmemory-policy to noeviction, optimizing memory usage and preventing eviction issues. The goal was to avoid high memory utilization, enhance performance, and customize Redis configurations, following ElastiCache best practices.
The Redis migration to ElastiCache for Redis in AWS was carried out in three main phases:
Phase 1: Preparation and Planning
- Assessment of Current Environment: Evaluated the existing self-managed Redis setup, focusing on data size and resource utilization, ensuring compatibility with ElastiCache in AWS.
- ElastiCache Architecture Design: Created a new architecture utilizing ElastiCache for Redis, ensuring compatibility with existing applications and minimal downtime during the migration.
- Security and Compliance: Configured VPC, subnets, and security groups to secure the ElastiCache deployment using Terraform modules, following ElastiCache best practices.
Phase 2: Provision resources and Deployment
Terraform Script: Developed a Terraform module with custom values to deploy the ElastiCache for Redis replication group on AWS.
Provision Resources: Deployed the ElastiCache for Redis instance on AWS using the ElastiCache Terraform module with custom configurations.
Secrets Update: Updated the Redis host key value in the application’s configuration to connect to the AWS-managed Redis instance, ensuring ElastiCache availability.
Phase 3: Post-Migration
Monitoring and Optimization: Implemented a Grafana dashboard to monitor CPU and memory utilization of the Redis instance, with regular reviews of performance metrics to make necessary adjustments in line with ElastiCache best practices.
Decommissioning: Removed the self-managed Redis setup by deleting the associated Helm charts after confirming the stability and reliability of the ElastiCache environment.
High Level Architecture Diagram
Results and Benefits
Reduced Operational Overhead: Offloaded management tasks, such as backups, software updates, and scaling, to AWS, reducing operational costs and effort.
Custom Parameter Configurations: Utilized ElastiCache’s custom parameter configurations to update the maxmemory-policy to noeviction, addressing high memory utilization issues.
Improved Performance: Achieved lower latency and higher throughput, resulting in a better user experience.
Increased Security: Implemented robust security measures, including encryption in transit and at rest, and integrated AWS IAM for fine-grained access control.
About IAMOPS
IAMOPS is a full DevOps suite company that supports technology companies to achieve intense production readiness.
Our mission is to ensure that our clients’ infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines are scalable, mitigate failure points, optimize performance, ensure uptime, and minimize costs.
Our DevOps suite includes DevOps Core, NOC 24/7, FinOps, QA Automation, and DevSecOps to accelerate overall exponential growth.
As an AWS Advanced Tier Partner and Reseller, we focus on two key pillars: Professionalism by adhering to best practices and utilizing advanced technologies, and Customer Experience with responsiveness, availability, clear project management, and transparency to provide an exceptional experience for our clients.
