Author: Diogo Carleto

Redis has released its new product named Redis Cloud Packages, a combination of pre-configured Redis Cloud instances designed to meet specific workloads and use cases, allowing users to skip from manual configurations and removing the hassle of managing Redis instances, making it more accessible and efficient for developers. Users can use a package for caching, NoSQL databases, or vector search.

Redis Cloud is designed to deliver a fully-managed Redis database on major public cloud services, providing all the features of Redis Enterprise to users, such as: instant failover, backups and recovery, 24/7 monitoring and support, linear scalability and predictable performance.

Redis as a Vector search aims to provide a foundation for AI applications from recommendation systems to document chat, allowing developers to ground their own virtual assistants utilizing agents and RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to enhance responses from LLMs (Large Language Models). Furthermore, Redis Vector indexes are managed with similarity search. Users can choose between the following techniques: FLAT – that is a brute force approach, and HSNW – an approximate method utilizing Hierarchical Small Word graphs efficient search. The metrics supported in Redis vector search to measure the similarity between two vectors are Euclidean, Inner Product, and Cosine. Users interested in exploring Redis Vector search can find resources in the Redis learn section page.

Harrison Chase, co-founder and CEO of LangChain, stated:

“We’re using Redis Cloud for everything persistent in OpenGPTs, including as a vector store for retrieval and a database to store messages and agent configurations. The fact that you can do all of those in one database from Redis is really appealing.”

RedisJSON is a high-performance NoSQL document store that provides native APIs to ingest, index, run query and full-text search on JSON documents, its main capabilities including:

• In-Memory JSON store – Store and process scheme-free JSON in-memory, supporting millions of operations per second
• Index and querying – it is possible to create indexes on JSON documents, perform complex aggregations, and filter by properties, numeric ranges, and geographical distance
• Full-text / fuzzy search – JSON supports full-text indexing and stemming-based query expansion in multiple languages, providing a rich query language that can perform text searches, as well as complex structured queries, and “fuzzy” searches

Let’s see an example of the creation of a JSON document within a single Redis key named “testkey”:

redis> JSON.SET testkey . '[ 123, { "life": 42 },{"fish","please"} ]'
OK
redis> JSON.GET testkey "[123,{"life":42},{"fish","please"}]"

It is important to notice that both Redis Enterprice and Redis Cloud are compatible with Redis Community Edition.

To get started, users just need to sign up with a Google or GitHub account and choose between the plans available. Currently there are three subscription plans:

• Free Redis Cloud Essentials – designed for training and prototyping purposes, it comes with 30MB storage and max 30 concurrent connections
• Redis Cloud Essentials (paid) – a cost-efficient option for low throughput scenarios; it comes with a storage capacity ranging from 250MB to 12GB, and 256 to Unlimited concurrent connections
• Redis Cloud Pro – this one supports more databases, greater throughput and unlimited connections compared to the Redis Cloud Essentials, it brings 50TB storage and unlimited concurrent connections

More details about subscriptions plans are available on the subscription page.

Docker has released Docker Desktop 4.27. This version brings Docker Init to “generally available” (GA) with Java support, synchronized file shares, support for TestContainers with Enhanced Container Isolation (ECI), Docker Build Cloud, Docker Debug and more.

Docker Init, initially released in beta in Docker 4.18, is a CLI command designed to make it easy to add Docker resources to any project by “initializing” or creating the required assets and scaffolding. Docker 4.26 added support for PHP, and now Docker 4.27 has added support for Java. The list of supported languages now includes Go, Node.js, Rust, and ASP.NET.

To create the assets automatically, it is only necessary to run the command docker init within the folder of the target project, and this will automatically create the dockerfiles, compose, and .dockerignore files, based on the characteristics of the project.

Synchronized file shares is an alternative file-sharing mechanism aimed to solve the challenges of using large codebases in containers with virtual filesystems. According to Docker, this feature boosts 2-10x the file operation speed through the use of synchronized filesystem caches. Beyond the users who have large repositories, users who are using virtual filesystems such as VirtioFS, gRPC FUSE, and osxfs, or are experiencing performance limitations can benefit from this feature.

Docker Desktop 4.27 introduces the ability to use TestContainers with Enhanced Container Isolation (ECI). ECI provides a new layer of security to prevent malicious workloads running in containers from compromising the Docker Desktop or the host by running containers without root access to the Docker Desktop VM.

Docker Build Cloud is a service designed to allow users to build container images faster, both locally and in CI. The native builds (for AMD64 and ARM64 CPU architectures) run in the cloud and use a remote build cache, aiming to ensure fast builds anywhere and for all team members.

Docker Debug Beta is a CLI command designed to help developers find and solve problems faster, it provides a language-independent, integrated toolbox for debugging local and remote containerized apps. To get started, just run docker debug in the Docker Desktop CLI.

In Docker 4.26, the Docker Builds view became GA. This is a simple interface in Docker Desktop designed to give users visibility of active builds currently running in the system, enabling the analysis and debugging of completed builds. Every build started with docker build or docker buildx build will automatically appear in the Builds view. From there, it is possible to inspect the properties of a build invocation, including timing information, build cache usage, Dockerfile source, log access, etc.

Since Docker 4.26, users can create containers in the cloud with Docker Desktop and Microsoft Dev Box. To start using Microsoft Dev Box, users must go to the Azure marketplace and download the public preview of the Docker Desktop-Dev Box compatible image.

More details about the news of the Docker Desktop can be found in the release notes.