Feature Comparison: Valkey and Redis vs. WebSphere eXtreme Scale

Developers of enterprise-grade Java applications know you can never have enough speed. Traditional databases often become bottlenecks when developing modern, distributed apps. Instead, developers will turn to in-memory data grids (IMDGs) and high-performance data stores. 

IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale (WXS) has been a prominent player in this space for years. Developers who might prefer the blazing-fast in-memory data stores Valkey or Redis were stifled by their lack of Java support out of the box. Redisson PRO addresses this by making Valkey and Redis available to Java developers through familiar methods and classes. Even better, Redisson PRO adds numerous features not available in stock Valkey or Redis installations. This feature comparison will cover the advantages of choosing Valkey or Redis in combination with Redisson PRO over WXS.

Collections

For complex application logic, developers must move past simple key-value storage. Instead, they need rich data structures like lists, sets, and maps. These distributed collections allow multiple application instances to access and modify shared data structures concurrently. Both WXS and Valkey/Redis with Redisson PRO offer maps.

• Multimap        
• JSON Store
• Set
• List  
• SortedSet 
• ScoredSortedSet
• TimeSeries

Queues

Resilient and scalable applications rely on distributed queues for asynchronous processing and service decoupling. Redisson PRO harnesses the power of Valkey/Redis to provide a range of distributed queue options, while WXS focuses on data caching and grid capabilities.

Redisson PRO includes standard implementations unavailable in WXS, like Queue and Deque, alongside more specialized options such as the Reliable Queue, which guarantees message processing. For scenarios where some messages require priority handling, Redisson PRO offers PriorityQueue and PriorityDeque. Redisson PRO also has a TransferQueue for blocking handoffs and a RingBuffer for fixed-size storage. Meanwhile, the Stream object provides robust, persistent messaging capabilities.

Objects

Beyond the standard collection types, Redisson PRO offers a rich set of distributed objects, abstracting the underlying data structures into familiar Java interfaces. This allows developers to  leverage the advanced features of Valkey/Redis easily. WXS does not have a comparable suite of specialized distributed object types.  

Redisson PRO's distributed objects include:

• Object holder (RBucket) for serializable Java objects.
• JSON holder (RJsonBucket) for JSON data.
• Publish/Subscribe (RTopic) for broadcasting messages.
• Reliable Publish/Subscribe (RReliableTopic) for guaranteed message delivery.
• Geospatial (RGeo) object for storing and querying coordinates.
• BloomFilter (RBloomFilter) for membership testing.
• HyperLogLog (RHyperLogLog) for estimating unique elements.
• RateLimiter (RRateLimiter) for controlling operation rates.

Counters

In distributed systems, metrics, unique identifiers, and other numerical values must be atomically maintained across multiple nodes. Since WXS is primarily a data grid, it offers no dedicated distributed atomic number types or ID generation feature out of the box. Redisson PRO offers familiar Java interfaces for these operations. AtomicLong and AtomicDouble perform atomic arithmetic operations on long and double values, respectively. For high-throughput counting scenarios, Redisson PRO offers LongAdder and DoubleAdder. On top of all that, Redisson PRO offers an Id Generator for generating unique, non-sequential IDs distributed across the system.

Locks and Synchronizers

With distributed systems, it’s critical to coordinate access to shared resources across multiple nodes. Otherwise, you run the risk of inconsistent or corrupted data. Distributed locks and synchronizers handle this coordination. 

Redisson PRO offers a comprehensive set of locks and synchronizers that mirror the concurrency found in Java's java.util.concurrent package, but adapted for a distributed environment. This includes the standard Lock implementation and FairLock, which ensures waiting threads acquire the lock in the order they requested it. The ReadWriteLock object allows for multiple concurrent readers but exclusive writers. 

To manage access to a limited pool of resources, there's the Semaphore object, and CountDownLatch allows one or more threads to wait until a set of operations being performed by other threads finishes. More advanced use cases are covered by the Fenced Lock, which provides a fencing token to help ensure correctness in leader election scenarios, the performance-oriented Spin Lock, and the MultiLock for coordinating locks across multiple independent Redis/Valkey instances.

On the other hand, WXS provides transactional capabilities for data consistency within its grid, but it doesn’t have distributed locks or synchronizer objects comparable to Redisson PRO.

Advanced Cache Support

Redisson PRO and WXS both support a number of advanced caching strategies:

API Architecture

In today’s enterprise-grade applications built with non-blocking architectures and reactive programming principles, the client API architecture is an important consideration. Redisson PRO provides multiple API models that align perfectly with what today’s Java developers need. For example, it offers a robust Asynchronous interface that allows operations to be performed without blocking the calling thread, crucial for high-throughput systems. 

In addition, Redisson PRO fully supports the Reactive Streams interface for integration with popular reactive frameworks like Project Reactor and RxJava. It also specifically provides an RxJava3 interface for developers who like that particular reactive library. Meanwhile, the primary WXS API is mostly synchronous. While it may offer some limited asynchronous capabilities, it does not provide native support for Reactive Streams or RxJava3.

Integration With Frameworks

Redisson PRO can integrate with many caches, session managers, and other frameworks. WXS also supports some of the more popular frameworks, although not as many as Redisson PRO, as this table shows:

Distributed services

Redisson PRO offers a built-in suite of distributed services for Java applications. This includes the ExecutorService, which allows for the execution of Java tasks across a cluster. The MapReduce service provides a framework for processing the data stored in Valkey or Redis. For scheduling tasks reliably in a distributed environment, the SchedulerService is available. The RemoteService enables remote procedure calls (RPCs), allowing methods of objects in one JVM to be invoked by another. Finally, the LiveObjectService provides an innovative way to work with distributed objects. WXS has no functionality that compares to these distributed services.

Security

Both Redisson PRO and WXS support standard security practices:

Data Serialization

Data serialization is one of the most important aspects of distributed systems, as it converts live Java objects into a format that can be stored in memory (or on disk) and transmitted across the network. WXS supports standard JDK serialization, but Redisson PRO includes a wide range of popular serialization codecs:

Stability and ease of use

With distributed systems, stability and ease of use are just as important as the feature set. Redisson PRO, coupled with either Valkey or Redis, has a significant advantage in the "ease of use" category, as it supports numerous fully managed cloud services. Developers can easily leverage popular services like AWS ElastiCache, Azure Cache for Redis, and Google Cloud Memorystore, offloading the burden of infrastructure management to the cloud provider. WXS, meanwhile, doesn't offer comparable support for these fully managed services.

On the stability front, both Redisson PRO and WXS are designed to handle large amounts of in-memory data, a fundamental requirement for high-performance caching and distributed applications. Redisson PRO benefits from the superior memory management built into Valkey and Redis. WXS can be equally stable in an IBM-centric infrastructure environment, maintaining high performance while offering features like replication and failover.

Redisson PRO or WebSphere eXtreme: Which One Is for You?

WebSphere eXtreme Scale remains an excellent in-memory data grid favored by Java developers worldwide. However, Redis or Valkey combined with Redisson PRO provides developers with a wider range of critical features. Redisson PRO offers distributed data structures, specialized queues, and numerous objects not available in WXS. Not to mention, Redisson PRO's API support aligns better with contemporary, non-blocking application designs.