Redis is an advanced key-value cache and store. It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets, bitmaps and hyperloglogs.

# Testing configuration
$ helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
$ helm install my-release bitnami/redis

# Production configuration
$ helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
$ helm install my-release bitnami/redis --values values-production.yaml

This chart bootstraps a Redis deployment on a Kubernetes cluster using the Helm package manager.

Bitnami charts can be used with Kubeapps for deployment and management of Helm Charts in clusters. This chart has been tested to work with NGINX Ingress, cert-manager, fluentd and Prometheus on top of the BKPR.

You can choose any of the two Redis Helm charts for deploying a Redis cluster. While Redis Helm Chart will deploy a master-slave cluster using Redis Sentinel, the Redis Cluster Helm Chart will deploy a Redis Cluster topology with sharding. The main features of each chart are the following:

Redis	Redis Cluster
Supports multiple databases	Supports only one database. Better if you have a big dataset
Single write point (single master)	Multiple write points (multiple masters)

• Kubernetes 1.12+
• Helm 2.12+ or Helm 3.0-beta3+
• PV provisioner support in the underlying infrastructure

To install the chart with the release name my-release:

$ helm install my-release bitnami/redis

The command deploys Redis on the Kubernetes cluster in the default configuration. The Parameters section lists the parameters that can be configured during installation.

Tip: List all releases using helm list

To uninstall/delete the my-release deployment:

$ helm delete my-release

The command removes all the Kubernetes components associated with the chart and deletes the release.

The following table lists the configurable parameters of the Redis chart and their default values.

Specify each parameter using the --set key=value[,key=value] argument to helm install. For example,

$ helm install my-release \
  --set password=secretpassword \
    bitnami/redis

The above command sets the Redis server password to secretpassword.

Alternatively, a YAML file that specifies the values for the parameters can be provided while installing the chart. For example,

$ helm install my-release -f values.yaml bitnami/redis

Tip: You can use the default values.yaml

Note for minikube users: Current versions of minikube (v0.24.1 at the time of writing) provision hostPath persistent volumes that are only writable by root. Using chart defaults cause pod failure for the Redis pod as it attempts to write to the /bitnami directory. Consider installing Redis with --set persistence.enabled=false. See minikube issue 1990 for more information.

It is strongly recommended to use immutable tags in a production environment. This ensures your deployment does not change automatically if the same tag is updated with a different image.

Bitnami will release a new chart updating its containers if a new version of the main container, significant changes, or critical vulnerabilities exist.

This chart includes a values-production.yaml file where you can find some parameters oriented to production configuration in comparison to the regular values.yaml. You can use this file instead of the default one.

• Number of slaves:

- cluster.slaveCount: 2
+ cluster.slaveCount: 3

• Enable NetworkPolicy:

- networkPolicy.enabled: false
+ networkPolicy.enabled: true

• Start a side-car prometheus exporter:

- metrics.enabled: false
+ metrics.enabled: true

To modify the Redis version used in this chart you can specify a valid image tag using the image.tag parameter. For example, image.tag=X.Y.Z. This approach is also applicable to other images like exporters.

When installing the chart with cluster.enabled=true, it will deploy a Redis master StatefulSet (only one master node allowed) and a Redis slave StatefulSet. The slaves will be read-replicas of the master. Two services will be exposed:

• Redis Master service: Points to the master, where read-write operations can be performed
• Redis Slave service: Points to the slaves, where only read operations are allowed.

In case the master crashes, the slaves will wait until the master node is respawned again by the Kubernetes Controller Manager.

When installing the chart with cluster.enabled=true and sentinel.enabled=true, it will deploy a Redis master StatefulSet (only one master allowed) and a Redis slave StatefulSet. In this case, the pods will contain en extra container with Redis Sentinel. This container will form a cluster of Redis Sentinel nodes, which will promote a new master in case the actual one fails. In addition to this, only one service is exposed:

• Redis service: Exposes port 6379 for Redis read-only operations and port 26379 for accesing Redis Sentinel.

For read-only operations, access the service using port 6379. For write operations, it's necessary to access the Redis Sentinel cluster and query the current master using the command below (using redis-cli or similar:

SENTINEL get-master-addr-by-name <name of your MasterSet. Example: mymaster>

This command will return the address of the current master, which can be accessed from inside the cluster.

In case the current master crashes, the Sentinel containers will elect a new master node.

To use a password file for Redis you need to create a secret containing the password.

NOTE: It is important that the file with the password must be called redis-password

And then deploy the Helm Chart using the secret name as parameter:

usePassword=true
usePasswordFile=true
existingSecret=redis-password-file
sentinels.enabled=true
metrics.enabled=true

TLS support can be enabled in the chart by specifying the tls. parameters while creating a release. The following parameters should be configured to properly enable the TLS support in the chart:

• tls.enabled: Enable TLS support. Defaults to false
• tls.certificatesSecret: Name of the secret that contains the certificates. No defaults.
• tls.certFilename: Certificate filename. No defaults.
• tls.certKeyFilename: Certificate key filename. No defaults.
• tls.certCAFilename: CA Certificate filename. No defaults.

For example:

First, create the secret with the cetificates files:

kubectl create secret generic certificates-tls-secret --from-file=./cert.pem --from-file=./cert.key --from-file=./ca.pem

Then, use the following parameters:

tls.enabled="true"
tls.certificatesSecret="certificates-tls-secret"
tls.certFilename="cert.pem"
tls.certKeyFilename="cert.key"
tls.certCAFilename="ca.pem"

Note TLS and Prometheus Metrics: Current version of Redis Metrics Exporter (v1.6.1 at the time of writing) does not fully support the use of TLS. By enabling both features, the metric reporting pod is likely to not work as expected. See Redis Metrics Exporter issue 387 for more information.

The chart optionally can start a metrics exporter for prometheus. The metrics endpoint (port 9121) is exposed in the service. Metrics can be scraped from within the cluster using something similar as the described in the example Prometheus scrape configuration. If metrics are to be scraped from outside the cluster, the Kubernetes API proxy can be utilized to access the endpoint.

Redis may require some changes in the kernel of the host machine to work as expected, in particular increasing the somaxconn value and disabling transparent huge pages. To do so, you can set up a privileged initContainer with the sysctlImage config values, for example:

sysctlImage:
  enabled: true
  mountHostSys: true
  command:
    - /bin/sh
    - -c
    - |-
      install_packages procps
      sysctl -w net.core.somaxconn=10000
      echo never > /host-sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled

Alternatively, for Kubernetes 1.12+ you can set securityContext.sysctls which will configure sysctls for master and slave pods. Example:

securityContext:
  sysctls:
  - name: net.core.somaxconn
    value: "10000"

Note that this will not disable transparent huge tables.

By default, the chart mounts a Persistent Volume at the /data path. The volume is created using dynamic volume provisioning. If a Persistent Volume Claim already exists, specify it during installation.

1. Create the PersistentVolume
2. Create the PersistentVolumeClaim
3. Install the chart

$ helm install my-release --set persistence.existingClaim=PVC_NAME bitnami/redis

To enable network policy for Redis, install a networking plugin that implements the Kubernetes NetworkPolicy spec, and set networkPolicy.enabled to true.

For Kubernetes v1.5 & v1.6, you must also turn on NetworkPolicy by setting the DefaultDeny namespace annotation. Note: this will enforce policy for all pods in the namespace:

kubectl annotate namespace default "net.beta.kubernetes.io/network-policy={\"ingress\":{\"isolation\":\"DefaultDeny\"}}"

With NetworkPolicy enabled, only pods with the generated client label will be able to connect to Redis. This label will be displayed in the output after a successful install.

With networkPolicy.ingressNSMatchLabels pods from other namespaces can connect to redis. Set networkPolicy.ingressNSPodMatchLabels to match pod labels in matched namespace. For example, for a namespace labeled redis=external and pods in that namespace labeled redis-client=true the fields should be set:

networkPolicy:
  enabled: true
  ingressNSMatchLabels:
    redis: external
  ingressNSPodMatchLabels:
    redis-client: true

A major chart version change (like v1.2.3 -> v2.0.0) indicates that there is an incompatible breaking change needing manual actions.

For releases with usePassword: true, the value sentinel.usePassword controls whether the password authentication also applies to the sentinel port. This defaults to true for a secure configuration, however it is possible to disable to account for the following cases:

• Using a version of redis-sentinel prior to 5.0.1 where the authentication feature was introduced.
• Where redis clients need to be updated to support sentinel authentication.

If using a master/slave topology, or with usePassword: false, no action is required.

For releases with metrics.enabled: true the default tag for the exporter image is now v1.x.x. This introduces many changes including metrics names. You'll want to use this dashboard now. Please see the redis_exporter github page for more details.

This version causes a change in the Redis Master StatefulSet definition, so the command helm upgrade would not work out of the box. As an alternative, one of the following could be done:

• Recommended: Create a clone of the Redis Master PVC (for example, using projects like this one). Then launch a fresh release reusing this cloned PVC.

helm install my-release bitnami/redis --set persistence.existingClaim=<NEW PVC>

• Alternative (not recommended, do at your own risk): helm delete --purge does not remove the PVC assigned to the Redis Master StatefulSet. As a consequence, the following commands can be done to upgrade the release

helm delete --purge <RELEASE>
helm install <RELEASE> bitnami/redis

Previous versions of the chart were not using persistence in the slaves, so this upgrade would add it to them. Another important change is that no values are inherited from master to slaves. For example, in 6.0.0 slaves.readinessProbe.periodSeconds, if empty, would be set to master.readinessProbe.periodSeconds. This approach lacked transparency and was difficult to maintain. From now on, all the slave parameters must be configured just as it is done with the masters.

Some values have changed as well:

• master.port and slave.port have been changed to redisPort (same value for both master and slaves)
• master.securityContext and slave.securityContext have been changed to securityContext(same values for both master and slaves)

By default, the upgrade will not change the cluster topology. In case you want to use Redis Sentinel, you must explicitly set sentinel.enabled to true.

Previous versions of the chart were using an init-container to change the permissions of the volumes. This was done in case the securityContext directive in the template was not enough for that (for example, with cephFS). In this new version of the chart, this container is disabled by default (which should not affect most of the deployments). If your installation still requires that init container, execute helm upgrade with the --set volumePermissions.enabled=true.

The default image in this release may be switched out for any image containing the redis-server and redis-cli binaries. If redis-server is not the default image ENTRYPOINT, master.command must be specified.

• master.args and slave.args are removed. Use master.command or slave.command instead in order to override the image entrypoint, or master.extraFlags to pass additional flags to redis-server.
• disableCommands is now interpreted as an array of strings instead of a string of comma separated values.
• master.persistence.path now defaults to /data.

This version removes the chart label from the spec.selector.matchLabels which is immutable since StatefulSet apps/v1beta2. It has been inadvertently added, causing any subsequent upgrade to fail. See helm/charts#7726.

It also fixes helm/charts#7726 where a deployment extensions/v1beta1 can not be upgraded if spec.selector is not explicitly set.

Finally, it fixes helm/charts#7803 by removing mutable labels in spec.VolumeClaimTemplate.metadata.labels so that it is upgradable.

In order to upgrade, delete the Redis StatefulSet before upgrading:

$ kubectl delete statefulsets.apps --cascade=false my-release-redis-master

And edit the Redis slave (and metrics if enabled) deployment:

kubectl patch deployments my-release-redis-slave --type=json -p='[{"op": "remove", "path": "/spec/selector/matchLabels/chart"}]'
kubectl patch deployments my-release-redis-metrics --type=json -p='[{"op": "remove", "path": "/spec/selector/matchLabels/chart"}]'

The metrics exporter has been changed from a separate deployment to a sidecar container, due to the latest changes in the Redis exporter code. Check the official page for more information. The metrics container image was changed from oliver006/redis_exporter to bitnami/redis-exporter (Bitnami's maintained package of oliver006/redis_exporter).

In order to improve the performance in case of slave failure, we added persistence to the read-only slaves. That means that we moved from Deployment to StatefulSets. This should not affect upgrades from previous versions of the chart, as the deployments did not contain any persistence at all.

This version also allows enabling Redis Sentinel containers inside of the Redis Pods (feature disabled by default). In case the master crashes, a new Redis node will be elected as master. In order to query the current master (no redis master service is exposed), you need to query first the Sentinel cluster. Find more information in this section.