Persistence

Metarank supports two possible persistence modes:
​Memory: ephemeral; all state is in RAM.
​Redis: state persisted in remote Redis.
Persistence mode is configured by the optional state section in the configuration file. By default, if the section is not defined, Metarank uses memory persistence.
Memory persistence
Memory persistence is no persistence at all: the complete Metarank state is stored only in RAM, is ephemeral, and will be entirely lost on each service restart.
Nevertheless, memory persistence can be useful:
While testing Metarank locally in a standalone mode, as it has no external service dependencies.
As a staging env to validate configuration changes before going to production.
To configure memory persistence, use the type: memory option:
state:
  type: memory
Redis persistence
Metarank can use Redis 6+ as a persistence method. To enable it, use the following config file snippet:
state:
  type: redis
  host: localhost
  port: 6379
  format: binary # optional, default=binary, possible values: json, binary
​
  cache:           # optional
    maxSize: 1024  # size of in-memory client-side cache for hot keys, optional, default=1024
    ttl: 1h        # how long should key-values should be cached, optional, default=1h
​
  pipeline:         # optional
    maxSize: 128    # batch write buffer size, optional, default=128
    flushPeriod: 1s # buffer flush interval, optional, default=1s
    enabled: true   # toggle pipelining, optional, default=true
​
  auth:                  # optional
    user: <username>     # optional when Redis ACL is disabled
    password: <password> # required if Redis server is run with requirepass argument
  
  tls:                   # optional, defaults to disabled
    enabled: true        # optional, defaults to false
    ca: <path/to/ca.crt> # optional path to the CA used to generate the cert, defaults to the default keychain
    verify: full         # optional, default=full, possible values: full, ca, off
    # full - verify both certificate and hostname
    # ca   - verify only certificate
    # off  - skip verification
​
  timeout:      # optional, defaults to 1s for all sub-timeouts
    connect: 1s # optional, defaults to 1s
    socket: 1s  # optional, defaults to 1s
    command: 1s # optional, defaults to 1s
Redis persistence is sensitive to network latencies (as it needs to perform a couple of round-trips on each event), hence Metarank leverages a couple of Redis performance optimization strategies:
​Pipelining: all write operations are batched together and sent all at once
​Client-side caching: read cache for hot keys with server-assisted invalidation.
A note on optional cache & pipelining related settings:
Metarank has a separate cache per underlying feature type (like scalar/counter/map/etc, 10 total), so cache.maxSize is set per cache type, so keep in mind an implicit multiplication: default value 1024 in reality means 10240.
cache.ttl defines expiration interval after last read, so hot features may be cached almost indefinitely. The problem of stale cache values is solved with server-assisted invalidation: Redis server sends a notification to Metarank when key value was changed by someone else.
pipeline.maxSize going above 128 is usually giving no benefit on low latencies (e.g. when Redis server is located in the same datacenter/AZ)
pipeline.flushPeriod controls the level of "eventualness" in the overall eventual consistency. With values larger than 10 seconds, a second Metarank instance may not see write buffered in a first instance.
TLS Support
Metarank supports connecting to Redis using TLS for transport encryption, but there is no way to autodetect the type of connection.
To connect to a TLS-enabled Redis server with self-signed certificate, you need to specify the CA used to sign the certificate (for self-signed certs it will be the server certificate itself):
enabled: true
ca: /tls/key.crt
To connect to a TLS-enabled Redis server with a certificate generated with default CA (for example, AWS ElastiCache Redis), then you don't need to specify any custom CA:
enabled: true
In a case when you have cert trust issues connecting to a TLS-enabled redis, you can downgrade the verification level. Supported levels are:
full - verify both certificate and hostname
ca - verify only the certificate
off - skip verification, trust all
An example:
enabled: true
verify: off
Authentication
auth.user and auth.password can control the credentials used to connect to Redis. As hardcoding the credentials into the config file is not usually considered secure, you can supply the credentials from environment variables:
METARANK_REDIS_USER - only needed when Redis ACL is enabled.
METARANK_REDIS_PASSWORD - the pre-shared password used to connect to the Redis instance.
Metarank's Helm chart has a placeholder for the env variables passed inside the container inside Kubernetes. Usage example:
env: 
  - name: METARANK_REDIS_PASSWORD
    valueFrom:
      secretKeyRef:
        name: redis-secret
        key: REDIS_PASSWORD
State encoding formats
Metarank Redis persistence supports json and binary encoding formats for data stored in Redis:
json: focused on readability and debugging simplicity.
binary: low-overhead binary encoding format, with better performance and smaller memory footprint.
binary format on typical datasets (like RankLens) is ~2x faster and takes ~4x less RAM. We recommend it for larger datasets, when memory usage and associated costs are an important factor.
Redis support limitations
Metarank requires Redis 6+ due to a lack of client-side caching support in 5.x
you can disable client caching altogether (for example, for managed Redis-compatible engines, like GCP Memorystore Redis) with cache.maxSize: 0.
Redis Cluster is not yet supported; see ticket 568 for the progress.
Last modified 16d ago