What is the point of REDIS in ELK stack?

Question

I currently have architecture with filebeat as the log shipper, which sends logs to log stash indexer instance and then to managed elastic search in AWS. Due to persistent TCP connections, I cannot load balance using AWS ELB multiple log stash indexer instances since filebeats always picks on of the instances and sends it there. So I decided to use redis. Now seeing how difficult it is to scale redis and make it highly available compontent in ELK stack I want to ask what is even the point of redis. I read a million times it acts as a buffer, but if filebeats stops sending logs to logstash if logstash can't handle the load, why do we even need a buffer. Filebeat is smart enough to know to stop sending logs. Logstash is smart enough to stop sending logs to elastic search if elastic search goes down. So the pipeline stops. I really don't understand of the redis acting as a buffer in every standard ELK architecture.

Answer 1

Redis or Kafka or XYZ can be used as buffer in the ELK stack as you've rightly noticed.

The ES folks published a blog post yesterday about using Kafka in the pipeline, but it could as well have been Redis or XYZ. They make a good point about WHEN such a buffer could be needed and when it is not.

It is a good idea to have such a buffer in order to

1. handle event spikes
2. deal with a potentially unreachable ES cluster

If you don't anticipate such behaviors, i.e. you know

1. your events will always come at the same rate and/or
2. you're ok with your logs being shipped a bit later in case you need to upgrade your ES cluster

...then you don't need such a buffer. What's more, that will be one less piece of software you need to manage, monitor and maintain.

When it comes to the Elastic Stack ecosystem, there's no one-size-fits-all approach, it always depends on your precise use case and requirements. You need to ask yourself what is important to you, your system(s) and your users and then design your solution accordingly.