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I have a remote server running Redis where I want to push a lot of a data from a Java application. Until now I used Webdis to push one command at the time which is not efficient, but I did not have any security issues because I could define the IPs that were accepted as connections and coomand authorizations while redis was not accepting requests from outside (protected mode).

I want to try to use jedis(Java API) and the implementation of pipeline for faster insertion but that means I have to open my Redis to accept requests from outside.

My question is this: Is it possible to use webdis in a similar way(pipilined mass insertion)? And if not what are the security configurations I need to make to use something like Jedis over the internet?

Thanks in advance for any answer

Michail N
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  • You can set up redis to require a password before entering commands: https://redis.io/commands/auth – dizzyf May 17 '17 at 20:54

2 Answers2

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IMO it should be transparent for Redis driver how you set up the security. No driver or password protection will be so secure as specifically designed protocols or technologies.

In the most simple way I'd handle the security, is letting Redis listening on 127.0.0.1:<some port> and using an SSH tunnel to the machine. At least this way you can test the performance agains your current scenario.

You can also use IPSec or OpenVPN afterwards to organize private network which is able to communicate with Redis server.

ovanes
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This question is almost 4 years old so I hope its author has moved on by now, but in case someone else has the same issue I thought I might suggest a way to send data to Webdis more efficiently.

You can indeed make data ingest faster by batching your inserts, meaning you can use MSET to insert multiple keys in a single request (or HMSET for hashes, etc).

As an example, here's ApacheBench (ab) inserting one key 100,000 times using 100 clients:

$ ab -c 100 -n 100000 -k 'http://127.0.0.1:7379/SET/foo/bar'
[...]
Requests per second:    82235.15 [#/sec] (mean)

We're measuring 82,235 single-key inserts per second. Keep in mind that there's a lot more to HTTP benchmarking than just looking at averages (the latency distribution is still important, etc.) but this example is only about showing the difference that batching can make.

You can send commands to Webdis in one of three ways (documented here):

  1. GET /COMMAND/arg0/.../argN
  2. POST / with COMMAND/arg0/.../argN in the HTTP body (demonstrated below)
  3. PUT /COMMAND/arg0.../argN-1 with argN in the HTTP body

If instead of inserting one key per request we create a file containing the MSET command to write 100 keys in a single request, we can significantly increase the write rate.

# first showing what the command looks like for 3 keys
$ echo -n 'MSET' ; for i in $(seq 1 3); do echo -n "/key-${i}/value-${i}"; done
MSET/key-1/value-1/key-2/value-2/key-3/value-3

# then saving the command to write 100 keys to a file:
$ (echo -n 'MSET' ; for i in $(seq 1 100); do echo -n "/key-${i}/value-${i}"; done) > batch-contents.txt

With this file, we can use ab to send this multi-insert file as a POST request (-p) to Webdis:

$ ab -c 100 -n 10000 -k -p ./batch-contents.txt -T 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded' 'http://127.0.0.1:7379/'
[...]
Requests per second:    18762.82 [#/sec] (mean)

This is showing 18,762 requests per second… with each request performing 100 inserts, for a total of 1,876,282 actual key inserts per second. If you track the CPU usage of Redis while ab is running, you'll find that the MSET use case pegs it at 100% CPU while sending individual SET does not.

Once again keep in mind that this is a rough benchmark, just enough to show that there is a significant difference when you batch inserts. This is true regardless of whether Webdis is used, by the way: batching inserts from a client connecting directly to Redis should also be much faster than individual inserts.

Note: (I am the author of Webdis)

Nicolas Favre-Felix
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