Hi everyone,
I’m in the middle of planning a migration for a small SaaS product from a single-server setup on a VPS to a more scalable cloud architecture. A key piece is moving our session store and API response cache from a self-managed Redis instance to a fully managed service. I’ve narrowed it down to the big three: AWS ElastiCache, Azure Cache for Redis, and Google Cloud Memorystore for Redis.
As a first-time evaluator of these services, I’m trying to cut through the marketing and understand the practical differences. Our needs are pretty standard:
- Primary region deployment (US Central)
- High availability (multi-zone)
- Around 10 GB of memory to start
- Daily automated backups
I’ve been reading the docs, but I’d really value real-world experiences, especially around:
- **Operational overhead**: How hands-on is the maintenance, scaling, and patching?
- **Latency consistency**: We’ve had spikes with our current setup. How stable is the latency, particularly for the basic get/set operations?
- **Cost surprises**: Are there any hidden costs or billing nuances you’ve encountered (like data transfer, backup storage, or minimum node sizes)?
- **Migration experience**: Any tips for a smooth migration from an external Redis instance?
We’re already using Google Workspace, so there’s some comfort with Google Cloud, but we’re trying to stay cloud-agnostic for this decision. If you’ve used one (or preferably compared them), I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Migration is never smooth.