Last night I saw Chander Dhall speak at the Rockstar Developers meetup.com meetup on Redis.

When Azure first arrived in the ASP.NET space I told myself: "I need to know this!" As it turns out, I don't need to know it. Chander cautioned against Azure and asserted that if you do it at all you have to have an all-in commitment to it. He recommends Rackspace and Amazon as cloud solutions above Azure but furthermore he really doesn't recommend that you go to the cloud. Having your own datacenter is really the better thing to do all in all. Not everyone can afford that obviously. Anyways, I bring up Azure as I was going to a Redis talk and I assumed it would be about using Redis Cache with Azure. It turns out that I don't need to mentally map Redis to Azure and that it, Redis, is pretty awesome and useful all by itself. This is a legitimate NoSQL solution like Cassandra or Mongo, in that it can be used to store key/value pairs. In the Azure space, one uses it to store what would otherwise be stored in session as an ASP.NET session is tied to a specific machine or VM and an Azure solution distributed across multiple places cannot reliably yank stuff in and out of session. However, you may also just use Redis as you would CouchDB (now Couchbase) for NoSQL. Memcached does all of this too, but while it just merely keeps strings, Redis is smart of enough to keep lists, datasets, ordered collections, etc. in the value half of a key/value pair. Not impressed yet? Alright Redis has Pub/Sub (publish/subscribe) and Chander argued that it was a lot better to go to Redis for queuing than NServiceBus. He dislikes NServiceBus as he feels that it was written poorly in a hodgepodge of C++ and C# in the name of providing C# APIs when it should have been written exclusively in C++ in the name of memory management and speed. Also Chander suggested that the use of messaging through JSON in NServiceBus brings in yet more lag and overhead and fatigue. Binary arrays would have been a better choice. Redis gets in right! The event was scheduled to be at Capital Factory and while I waited for it to get rolling I was given a tour of Capital Factory which was very impressive, but, as it turned out, only I and one other attendee attended so he and I and Chander Dhall and Eric McVicker just jumped ship on Capital Factory and caught dinner at Gloria's nearby but elsewhere in the downtown. More informally, we discussed Redis over chips and salsa.