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Comment by anonymousDan | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is anything to do with Redis server, you are simply using the Redis wire protocol/parser? I could be wrong...

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That’s correct but my point was that Redis has an out-of-the-box solution for “message passing arbitrary data using the Redis protocol over TCP to named endpoints”, and Redis Server is a very lightweight piece of software. Even if you aren’t using it as an in-memory key-value DB it’s not a big problem to pull it in to your stack even if you’re only gonna use it for PubSub or RPC/IPC.

This is a super cool write-up and I’m not saying anything negative about what the author did. I like it a lot. I’m just asking from a technical and curiosity perspective what the advantages are to this over using the stuff Redis Server already provides which can do the same thing.

With Elixir specifically, you have the option of clustering these things. We (fly.io) send messages between servers using NATS. This works well with geographically distributed infrastructure, messages are somewhat peer to peer. If we were using Redis, we'd need a round trip to a centralized server. And we'd need the internet to always work well.

You can do a similar thing with Elixir and your own protocol (or the Redis protocol).

Problem with redis as a Pub-sub is it’s not transactional. So a consumer can’t take temporary lease on a message try to process it and then delete the message if it was processed successfully.

This pattern is very common in banking but require something like RabbitMQ or Azure service bus …

I suppose the main advantages would be less dependencies (no Redis server). Less overhead (you aren’t routing though anything)

I haven’t looked at the exact performance characteristics but it would be fun! You would have built in load balancing!

Correct this post is about the Redis Protocol.

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