Since our initial release last year, Upstash was compatible with Redis® API up to version 5. Our Redis offering was lacking
commands such as GETDEL, LMOVE, COPY and features such as ACL
which were introduced in Redis 6 (and 6.2).
Happy to announce that Upstash Redis databases are now compatible with Redis commands up to version 6.2.
If you are using Cloudflare Workers, Upstash Global Redis and Workers KV are probably your best options to keep your data. In this post, I will briefly compare them as a data store for your Cloudflare Workers functions.
User feedback is important to guide product decisions. We built a widget to help you get feedback from your users. It is a React component which calls Next.js API as its backend. The backend API simply sends the feedback data to Upstash Redis database. Also, you will be able to see and manage the submitted data in Upstash Console Integrations Page
When you add the component to your Next.js page, an icon will be displayed on bottom right corner. When clicked, feedback form will be visible. Check the demo to see how it works.
Next.js enables developers to build full stack applications with the Server Side Rendering capability. Vercel and Netlify help them to write the backend API with serverless functions. So the next question is what is the ideal database for Next.js apps. In this post, I will review the databases which are popular among the Next.js community. I will comment on how they fit the serverless model. Two things to check:
In recent years, serverless architectures and edge computing are becoming very popular for application deployments. But storing application state and the data inside a serverless and/or edge function is a different story. There are many difficulties such as; managing the connections to the database, making the data available for fast access from multiple locations etc. There are only a few database services supporting serverless access and very few of those are also suitable for edge functions. (You can read a detailed analysis here.)
At Upstash, from day one, we are providing a serverless Redis compatible database for low latency and with a per-request pricing model. Additionally we expose a first-class REST API built directly on the database. REST API removes the connection management hassle, especially when used in serverless functions, but also accessible even from restricted environments like edge locations or web browsers.
Today we are happy to announce the Global Database, which is a step further to make the database available globally, closer to the clients and edge locations for low latency reads. Global Database is available on free tier, you can try it without any cost.
Serverless is great for developers who want to build an application end to end with lowest maintenance and financial cost. Serverless functions enable you to run your own code without maintaining the backend infra. But they are stateless by design so you need an external data store. So the next question is which databases are best fit for serverless? The good news is database vendors see the serverless trend and they are either launching either serverless offerings or trying to adapt their product. In this article, I will first list the things that make a database great for serverless. Then I will list the database that I personally think to be candidates to be the great database for Serverless.
We built a sample application which compares the performance of leading serverless databases using a common web use case and serverless functions. The databases are DynamoDB, MongoDB (Atlas), Firestore, Cassandra (Datastax Astra), FaunaDB and Redis (Upstash)
1 ms latency is easy with Redis when the database and clients are in the same region. But if you want the clients to be globally distributed then the latency rises over 100 ms. We built Edge Caching to overcome this.
AWS Lambda pioneered serverless space. Many developers think that serverless is the future of development. It gives you the true pay-per-use model, relieves you from the maintenance and scaling of the backend infrastructure. But it also comes with challenges. One of those is its statelessness. You need to keep the state in an external data store. Unfortunately most of the popular data stores are connection based. But as we explained in this post, managing connections can become painful in serverless. That’s why, we have developed a high performance REST API on top of Upstash Redis. In this blog post, I will implement a very basic stateful api (page counter) on AWS Lambda and Upstash Redis using the REST API.
We are thrilled to announce that now our Upstash Terraform Provider is publicly available. Our core principle is always being developer friendly. We have announced REST Api recently. Now it is time to expand our tools with the terraform provider plugin.
Terraform is a useful automation tool that lets you define your infrastructure as code. Collaboration becomes crazy easy in this way and every configuration change is persisted so everybody knows what is going on at the infrastructure.
After community requests, we have developed our terraform provider and now it is publicly available in the terraform marketplace.