Render Key Value

Render Key Value provides low-latency in-memory storage that's ideal for shared caches and job queues. Key Value instances are compatible with virtually all clients that interact with Redis®^*.

Paid Key Value instances include disk-backed persistence.

Underlying libraries

• Newly created Render Key Value instances run Valkey 8.

  + What is Valkey?

  Valkey is an open-source key-value store that began as a fork of Redis version 7.2.4. For most libraries and frameworks that connect to a Redis instance, Valkey is a drop-in replacement.

  Learn more in the FAQ.

• Legacy Key Value instances (created before Feburary 12, 2025) run Redis 6.

  • Legacy instances no longer receive version updates, but they will continue to operate as usual.

Quickstarts

These Render quickstarts include steps for provisioning a Key Value instance:

• Deploy a Celery background worker
• Deploy Rails with Sidekiq
• Rails caching with Redis
• Connecting to Render Key Value with ioredis

Create your Key Value instance

1. Go to dashboard.render.com/new/redis, or select New > Key Value in the Render Dashboard.

   This form appears:

   

2. Provide a helpful Name for your instance.

   • You can change this value at any time.

3. Choose a Region to run your instance in.

   • Choose the same region as your services that will connect to the instance. This minimizes latency and enables communication over your private network.

4. Optionally change the instance's Maxmemory Policy.

   • See details below.

5. Scroll down and select an instance type. This determines its available RAM and connection limit.

   Learn about Free instance type limitations.

   

6. Click Create Key Value.

You're all set! Your new instance's status updates to Available in the Render Dashboard when it's ready to use.

Connect to your Key Value instance

Every Key Value instance has two different URLs for incoming connections:

• An internal URL for connections from your other Render services running in the same region
  • Connections using the internal URL are unauthenticated by default. You can optionally require authentication for internal connections.
• An external URL for connections from everything else
  • Before you can use the external URL, you must first enable external connections for your Key Value instance.

Use the internal URL wherever possible. It minimizes latency by enabling communication over your private network.

Both URLs are available from the Connect menu in the top-right corner of your instance's page in the Render Dashboard:

Key Value instances use redis:// and rediss:// URL schemes. You can connect to your instance using any Redis-compatible client that supports these schemes.

Internal connection examples

import Redis from 'ioredis'

// Connect to your Key Value instance using the REDIS_URL environment variable
// The REDIS_URL is set to the internal connection URL e.g. redis://red-343245ndffg023:6379
const redis = new Redis(process.env.REDIS_URL)

// Set and retrieve some values
await redis.set('key', 'ioredis')
const result = await redis.get('key')
console.log(result)

import { createClient } from 'redis'

// Connect to your Key Value instance using the REDIS_URL environment variable
// The REDIS_URL is set to the internal connection URL e.g. redis://red-343245ndffg023:6379
const client = createClient({ url: process.env.REDIS_URL })
await client.connect()

// Set and retrieve some values
await client.set('key', 'node redis')
const value = await client.get('key')
console.log(value)

import os
import redis

# Connect to your Key Value instance using the REDIS_URL environment variable
# The REDIS_URL is set to the internal connection URL e.g. redis://red-343245ndffg023:6379
r = redis.from_url(os.environ['REDIS_URL'])

# Set and retrieve some values
r.set('key', 'redis-py')
print(r.get('key').decode())

require "redis"

# Connect to your internal Key Value instance using the REDIS_URL environment variable
# The REDIS_URL is set to the internal connection URL e.g. redis://red-343245ndffg023:6379
redis = Redis.new(url: ENV["REDIS_URL"])

# Set and retrieve some values
redis.set("key", "redis ruby!")
puts redis.get("key")

require "sidekiq"

# Connect to your internal Key Value instance using the REDIS_URL environment variable
# The REDIS_URL is set to the internal connection URL e.g. redis://red-343245ndffg023:6379
Sidekiq.configure_server do |config|
  config.redis = { url: ENV["REDIS_URL"] }
end

Sidekiq.configure_client do |config|
  config.redis = { url: ENV["REDIS_URL"] }
end

# Simple example from https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq/wiki/Getting-Started
class HardJob
  include Sidekiq::Job

  def perform(name, count)
    # do something
  end
end

HardJob.perform_async("bob", 5)

Enabling external connections

By default, newly created Key Value instances are not reachable at their external URL. To keep your instance secure, you can grant external access to specific sets of IPs.

In the Render Dashboard, go to your Key Value instance's Info page and scroll down to the Access Control section:

Here you can specify IP address blocks using CIDR notation. The example above grants access to the static outbound IPs for Render's Ohio region.

If you attempt to connect from a disallowed IP address, your client will display an error like the following:

AUTH failed: Client IP address is not in the allowlist.

Requiring auth for internal connections

By default, Key Value instances do not require authentication for internal connections over your private network. This is why the default internal connection URL doesn't include a username or password:

# An unauthenticated internal URL (default)
redis://red-abc123:6379

# An authenticated internal URL
redis://USERNAME_HERE:PASSWORD_HERE@red-abc123:6379

To enforce additional security or fulfill compliance requirements, your Key Value instance can require authentication for internal connections:

1. From your Key Value instance's Info page in the Render Dashboard, scroll down to the Connections section and click Enable Internal Authentication:

   Any existing connections that use your unauthenticated URL will break!

   Before enabling this feature, we strongly recommend migrating your existing connections to use an authenticated URL. See below.

   

2. A confirmation dialog appears. Review the advisories, then click Enable Internal Authentication.

After you confirm, Render restarts your Key Value instance (it will be unavailable for a few seconds).

After the restart:

• Your Key Value instance now requires authentication for all connections.
• In the Render Dashboard, your instance's internal connection URL now includes a username and password.

Migrating unauthenticated Key Value connections

Before you require authentication for internal Key Value connections, you can update all of your existing connections to use an authenticated URL. This will prevent those connections from breaking when you enable authentication.

1. Obtain your Key Value instance's external connection URL from the Connect menu:

   

   External URL isn't shown?

   You first need to add at least one IP range to your instance's access control list. To continue blocking all external connections, you can add the dummy IP range 0.0.0.0/32.

2. Extract the password from your external connection URL. The password starts just after the colon (:) and ends just before the "at" symbol (@):

   Copy to clipboard

   rediss://user:PASSWORD_HERE@red-abc123:6379

3. For each service that connects to your Key Value instance with the internal URL, modify its connection string as shown below:

   shCopy to clipboard

   # Before
   redis://red-abc123:6379
   
   # After
   redis://default:PASSWORD_HERE@red-abc123:6379

   Specifically, you add the username default and the password you extracted in the previous step. Every Key Value instance has a user named default, and this user can accept any password until auth is required.

4. Redeploy your modified services (unless they automatically redeployed when you updated their configuration).

5. You can now proceed through the steps to require authentication for internal connections.

After your Key Value instance restarts with authentication enabled, the default user now requires the exact password you provided. Because you've updated your connections accordingly, they remain functional.

Connecting with CLI tools

The redis-cli is a useful administrative tool for exploring and manipulating data on your Redis instance. There are 2 ways you can use redis-cli with your Redis instance:

• If you have a running non-Docker service, redis-cli will be available as part of the environment and is accessible from the service's Shell page. The service must be in the same region as the Redis instance. You can also SSH into that service and run redis-cli from there.

• You can run redis-cli locally on your machine. You first need to install redis-cli onto your machine. A copy and pastable redis-cli command is available in the External Access section of your Redis settings. Note that you first need to enable external connections for your Redis instance.

After you connect, you can set and get keys using various commands:

oregon-redis.render.com:6379> set "render_is_cool" true
OK
oregon-redis.render.com:6379> get "render_is_cool"
"true"
oregon-redis.render.com:6379> KEYS r*
1) "render_is_cool"

Configure your Key Value instance

Maxmemory policy

Your Key Value instance's maxmemory policy determines which data it evicts to free space when it reaches its memory limit. You select a policy on instance creation and can change it later.

• For caching use cases, we recommend using allkeys-lru.
• For job queues, we recommend using noeviction to ensure that queued jobs are not lost.
• For other use cases, select a policy from the table below based on your requirements.

You can select any of the following policies:

Changing instance types

You can upgrade your Key Value instance to a larger instance type with more RAM and a higher connection limit.

1. In the Render Dashboard, open your instance's Info page and scroll down to the Key Value Instance section.

2. Under Instance Type, click Update.

3. Select a new instance type and click Save Changes.

Blueprint configuration

As with your other services, you can manage your Key Value instances with Blueprints, Render's infrastructure-as-code model. For details and examples, see the Blueprint YAML Reference.

Data persistence

Paid Key Value instances on Render write their state to disk once per second via the configuration appendfsync everysec. If a paid instance experiences an interruption (or if you upgrade your instance type), you might lose up to one second of writes.

Free Key Value instances do not persist data to disk.

Metrics

Metrics for memory usage, CPU load, and active connections are available from your Key Value instance's Metrics page in the Render Dashboard:

For details, see Service Metrics.