I’ve written before about Garantia, the Israeli startup that is aiming to overcome some of the disadvantages that NoSQL databases come with – namely lack of persistence and scalability. Garantia’s solution is to offer Memcached with higher reliability and Redis with high scalability in an automated manner. Specific advantages include:
- Reliable memory – Zero data loss: built-in in-memory replication, data persistence, autofailover and backup capabilities
- Auto scaling – Fully-automated continuous scaling from megabytes to gigabytes to petabytes; All Redis commands supported at any dataset size
- Zero management – Takes seconds to activate and configure; no need to worry about nodes, clusters, server lists, data persistence configuration, scaling or failure recovery
- Cost savings – “Pay-as-you-go” charging model in GB granularity. Same per-gigabyte price of plain instances from existing cloud providers. Big savings on devops time
Garantia is today announcing the general availability of its product after a successful beta period. In general availability, Garantia’s pay as you go pricing model sees customers charged according to the size of their datasets (measured in GBs per hour per month) rather than by the number of cloud instances they are using. Garantia believes that this model helps to overcome the typical over-provisioning that occurs with other systems. Garantia offers a free plan with paid plans ranging from 0.1GB to 5GB.
One of the beta users of Garantia was tracks.by a music and video site. Co-founder Chase Sechrist seems pretty bullish about the value that Garantia offers saying that:
Being able to spawn self-scaling Redis servers on demand gives a new way to architect your application since you can allocate resources near immediately without any ops work or suffering performance. You don’t even have to configure a hash ring! We have been using the Redis Cloud in production for a few months now and believe it provides exactly the sort of functionality developers look for.
Garantia had some real world testing during four high profile AWS outages while they were in their beta period. In that time CEO Ofer Bengal claims that they didn’t lose a single byte of customer data – that fact backs up Garantia’s claim of resolving the persistence issues that often plagues these sort of applications.
In terms of availability, Redis Cloud and Memcached Cloud are available on AWS (U.S. East and EU (Ireland) West regions) and Windows Azure (U.S. East and U.S. West regions). Typical monthly subscriptions (Redis Cloud on AWS-U.S.-East) run from $8 for a 0.1GB plan to $375 for a 5GB plan. The Redis Cloud service is also available as an add-on on the Heroku, Appfog and AppHarbor platforms-as-a-service.
Scalability and reliability of NoSQL is an important step in the maturing of these alternative database approaches – Garantia is doing good work and looks set to garner some attention from customers keen to go the NoSQL route but concerned about the risks.
