ApsaraDB for Redis Enhanced Edition (Tair) is a cloud-based in-memory database service for enterprises. It is developed based on the Tair service used by Alibaba Group. ApsaraDB for Redis Enhanced Edition (Tair) has officially been in use within Alibaba Group since 2009 and has proven its outstanding performance in a variety of scenarios, including Double 11, Youku Spring Festival Gala, Cainiao, and AMAP.
Millstones of Tair
In 2004, Taobao started using caching technologies to support its business operations. This technology uses Edge Side Includes (ESI) to identify web content segments that can or cannot be accelerated. Frontend page caching reduces the number of times that entire pages are fetched from the server.
The rapid growth of customer traffic on Taobao brought more workloads on databases. Backend caching emerged in response to this situation. Backend caching has evolved over many iterations from TBStore to Taobao Database Manager (TDBM). TBStore provides services such as persisting Taobao details and verification codes. TDBM was initially used in Taobao User Center. In 2009, the large-scale and high-performance in-memory database service Tair was released based on the success of previous systems and technical experience.
Tair is one of the most popular systems of Alibaba Group. Tair can handle hundreds of millions of calls per second and has provided core online access acceleration during Double 11 events for many years.
| Time | Event |
|---|---|
| July 2021 | The following new series were released:
In the future, ApsaraDB for Redis Enhanced Edition (Tair) will focus on core cloud-native capabilities, such as hardware-software integration, intelligent data distribution, and integration of data storage and processing. |
| November 2019 | Tair 3.0, also called ApsaraDB for Redis Enhanced Edition (Tair), was released.
|
| April 2019 | The ApsaraDB for Redis team was recognized as one of the top three contributors in the Redis open source community and delivered a public speech at RedisConf 2019. |
| August 2018 | ApsaraDB for Redis started to offer hybrid-storage instances in China to separate cold data from hot data for the first time and reduce costs for main users. |
| November 2017 | Tair dynamic hashing provided support for the 2017 Double 11 event and was able to resolve several critical cache issues within the industry. |
| April 2017 | Tair 2.0 was released and started to provide services to the AMAP and Youku new business
units.
ApsaraDB for Memcache (OCS) was upgraded to ApsaraDB for Redis. |
| August 2016 | Tair Smart O&M Platform was released. The release of this platform contributed to the breakthrough of hundreds of billions of sales during the 2016 Double 11 event. |
| March 2015 | The Tair team released ApsaraDB for Redis. This release helped Tair enter the cloud era. |
| May 2014 | The Tair team released OCS, a cloud caching service. After OCS was released, OCS became a basic service of Alibaba Cloud and started to provide services for OCS users. |
| April 2013 | The Fastdump service was released. It can significantly reduce import time and access
latency.
Tair was implemented on a large scale in Alimama. |
| October 2012 | The Redis Database (RDB) cache engine was released with APIs that are similar to those used in open source Redis. This engine supports more flexible and complex data structures. |
| June 2011 | The Local Database (LDB) persistence engine was released to meet key-value storage requirements on the Internet. |
| November 2009 | Tair was used to support high traffic during the Double 11 event for the first time. |
| April 2009 | Tair 1.0 was released and used in business segments such as the Taobao core system, Memory-Mapped Database (MDB) cache, and User Center. |
Series and features of Tair
The rapid development of the Internet makes business scenarios more diverse and complicated. ApsaraDB for Redis Enhanced Edition (Tair) is a high-availability and high-performance NoSQL database service. It provides several series of instances based on storage media such as dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), non-volatile memory (NVM), and ESSDs to meet your requirements for low-latency access, persistence, and reduced overall costs. Tair provides higher performance, more data structures, and more flexible storage methods to meet your requirements in a variety of scenarios. For more information about ESSDs, see ESSDs.
| Series | Description |
|---|---|
| DRAM-based instances |
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| Persistent memory-optimized instances |
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| ESSD-based instances | ESSD-based instances are developed based on ESSDs and are compatible with core data structures and APIs of open source Redis. These instances can provide large-capacity, low-cost, and persistent database services. ESSD-based instances reduce costs and improve data reliability. In addition, ESSD-based instances reduce the amount of memory that is reserved for the forks of native Redis databases. This series type is suitable for scenarios that store warm and cold data, and require compatibility with open source Redis, large capacity, and high access performance. |
| Hybrid-storage instances (phased out) | Hybrid-storage instances store data in both memory and disks. During off-peak hours,
hybrid-storage instances can separate hot data from cold data to ensure a high memory
access speed and provide a larger storage than ApsaraDB for Redis Community Edition
instances. This allows hybrid-storage instances to balance performance with costs.
Note Hybrid-storage instances are phrased out. For more information, see End-of-Sale for ApsaraDB for Redis hybrid-storage instances. We recommend that you choose Persistent memory-optimized instances.
If you have purchased a hybrid-storage instance, you can submit a ticket to migrate the data of the instance. |