Redka on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Redka is a Redis compatible server that speaks the Redis wire protocol while persisting everything to a durable, queryable SQLite database. You talk to it with any Redis client, but the data lives in a plain SQLite file you can inspect and report on with ordinary SQL. Every value written over the protocol lands in the tables rkey, rstring, rlist, rset, rhash and rzset and in the matching read views vstring, vhash and vzset, so a value set with a Redis client is immediately visible with a SELECT statement. This cloudimg image runs the Redka server 1.0.1 from the pinned upstream release binary, verified against its published checksum, on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS as a hardened systemd service.

Redka is a natural fit for an embedded cache, a lightweight test environment that would otherwise need a Redis test container, and small scale workloads that want Redis style data structures with a relational, inspectable backend. It supports the five core Redis data types (strings, lists, hashes, sets and sorted sets), key and TTL management, and a handful of server and connection commands. It is a single node server: it does not provide clustering, replication, pub/sub, Lua scripting, streams, transactions over the wire, or the bitmap, geo and hyperloglog types, and it is therefore not a drop in replacement for a Redis cluster.

Security is a reason to take the packaged image. Redka has no authentication of its own: the upstream server exposes no password or AUTH command. Because there is no credential mechanism, this image ships no credential at all and enforces security by network isolation. The server is bound to loopback only on port 6379, the port is never opened on the network security group, and the packaged image proves this end to end at build time: the port is confirmed unreachable on the virtual machine's own routable address. Reach Redka locally on the machine or over an SSH tunnel, and never bind it to a public interface without an external, authenticating, TLS terminating proxy in front. The SQLite database lives on a dedicated Azure data disk, captured into the image and re-provisioned on every machine, and each machine starts with its own empty database.

Redka is distributed under the BSD 3 Clause License, free and open source with no per CPU or per deployment fee. cloudimg is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Redka project; Redka is a mark of its owner. cloudimg provides packaging, the secure by default configuration, the dedicated data disk, security patching, and 24/7 support with a guaranteed 24 hour response SLA.