Redis Queues: An Emerging Usecase

We’ve been covering tons of Redis usecases, not to mention this amazing list of ideas. Lately, it looks like there is a new emerging usecase that Redis can be proud of: queues.

Now if that already sounds interesting then I guess you could just take a look at QR, a Python ☞ GitHub hosted project that makes it easy to create queues, stacks and deques on top of Redis. For some help on using it you could check Ted Nyman’s posts on ☞ queues and ☞ deques and stacks. Another option would be to head to Resque, a Ruby ☞ GitHub hosted library for creating and processing jobs using Redis queues.

Anyway, if you don’t have yet an idea on how this can be useful, then I hope these following posts will wet your appetite. David Czarnecki’s ☞ article covers a very simple Redis-based queue scenario: inter-application communication (basically the two apps will get an easy way to pass from one to another any kind of messages). If this is still not enough, then Paull Gross’s ☞ post is introducing you to a web proxy built using node.js and Redis queues for high availability.

Last, but not least, I should emphasize the fact that what sets aside Redis as a good tool for this sort of things is not the fact that Redis is a extremely fast, persistent key-value store, but rather Redis native support for ☞ data structures like lists, sets and ordered sets and a set of specific ☞ commands to deal with these.