Aiven Adopts Dragonfly to Solve Redis Scalability Issues, Sees 700% Performance Boost

Intro

We are thrilled to announce that Aiven, the leading open-source cloud data platform, has made Aiven for Dragonfly generally available on the Aiven platform! We released Dragonfly on GitHub a year and a half ago as a modern alternative to Redis, so when Aiven came to us looking for a more scalable and efficient in-memory data store to serve their larger customers, we were excited to work with them.

Background

Aiven provides open-source data solutions, such as Kafka, PostgreSQL, and Redis, among others, to thousands of companies across more than ten cloud providers. Aiven's engineers developed a unique technology that transforms complex open-source solutions into simple and manageable infrastructure components that are easy to use. Customers prefer Aiven because of the wide range of services it offers and its adaptability in scaling those services.

Unlike other Aiven services that can handle terabyte-sized workloads, the Aiven Redis solution is limited and unsuitable for high-throughput traffic scenarios. Customers had consistently requested larger and more powerful Redis instances, but their demands were hindered by Redis' single-threaded architecture. When faced with sudden traffic surges or commands requiring intensive CPU usage, Redis instances would frequently become overloaded, compromising performance and reliability. In response to these challenges, Aiven embarked on a mission to find a better solution to meet their customers' needs.

Aiven Adopts Dragonfly

Aiven discovered Dragonfly back in November 2022. Initially, Aiven was interested in Dragonfly due to its modern, multi-threaded, shared-nothing architecture. They believed that this would allow Dragonfly to make much more efficient use of the underlying hardware and better serve the heavy workloads that had become problematic with Redis.

After Dragonfly was released in GA, Aiven began testing. They were surprised to discover that not only was Dragonfly much more scalable and simple to operate compared to Redis, but also that Dragonfly is able to deliver 700% more throughput while consuming 25% less memory running on the same hardware.

With these kinds of results, selecting Dragonfly was an easy choice. As one Aiven customer, Janek Wonner, Head of SRE and Cloud Technology at Conrad Electronics, which provides an advanced sourcing platform for technical supplies to 21 million customers worldwide, said: “Speed and scale are absolute necessities for our business. Our experience using Aiven for Dragonfly has been really valuable to support these business needs, from the ease of migration to improved performance and scalability. Being able to move from Aiven for Redis to Aiven for Dragonfly as our data needs grow, with ease and familiarity, is a real advantage of the Aiven platform. We can focus on our business growth with the confidence that our data infrastructure is as robust, scalable, and as fast as our business requires.”

Aiven for Dragonfly is a managed service that can be deployed in your preferred cloud environment. It provides lightning-fast data storage and retrieval capabilities and can handle workloads exceeding 1TB with more than 10 times the throughput performance of Redis OSS, along with reduced latency. This makes it an ideal solution for enterprises with growing data needs.

Aiven for Dragonfly is generally available today. Sign up to try it here. We are extremely happy to welcome Aiven to the growing Dragonfly community as we continue our mission to accelerate data at scale and power modern applications.

We will be holding a technical webinar with the Aiven team on April 10th to dive deeper into this new product, how it works, and what it's capable of. You can register and join for free here.