Reasons why Redis is a great option for a worker queue in Magento

Alan Kent asked on Twitter

What is your personal favorite HA distributed queue technology? RabbitMQ? Kafka? Redis? ActiveMQ? Why?

— Alan Kent (@akent99) February 4, 2015

You may know that I am partial to Redis as a worker queue for Magento.  Here are some reasons why.

1. It is stupid simple to set up (meaning nubes and philes can both use it)
2. It is blazing fast (it’s slow log is measured in microseconds)
3. It does pubsub for one to many
4. It does BLPOP for many to one
5. It’s already supported with the Cm_Redis stuff

Things you do not get

1. Durability
2. Complex routing rules

When I worked on my last talk for Imagine I spent a week trying to get a fast, working implementation of ActiveMQ and Rabbit.  I looked at it and thought “this is way more complicated than it needs to be” and tried Redis.  What I spent a week working on was up and running in 4 hours, including a Java-based worker and PHP refactoring.

The HA portion is missing out of the box but I believe with Sentinal you can achieve it.  In some ways it’s like MySQL.  It’s beastly easy to get set up and running but if you need to do more you can.