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 support disk-backed persistence and enable it by default.

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 February 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

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.

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

Obtaining connection URLs

Internal connection examples

To connect with your internal URL, your Key Value instance and your connecting service must belong to the same workspace and run in the same region.

Enabling external connections

These rules apply only to connections that use your Key Value instance's external URL.

Your Render services in the same region as your Key Value instance can always connect using your instance's internal URL.

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.

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

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:

External connections always require authentication.

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 immediately after the colon (:) and ends immediately before the "at" symbol (@):

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

   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 on your machine. You can copy a redis-cli command in the External Access section of your Redis settings. Note that you first need to enable external connections for your Redis instance.

External connections are TLS secured. The Redis CLI command provided will include the --tls flag.

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

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:

Data persistence

Data persistence is not available for free Key Value instances.

Paid Key Value instances can write their state to disk to preserve data across restarts, upgrades, and other interruptions. This data is encrypted at rest using AES-256 encryption.

You set one of the following persistence modes on instance creation:

• For caching use cases, we recommend turning persistence Off. This maximizes write performance when working with loss-tolerant data.
• For all other use cases, we recommend using Journal + Snapshot to maximize data retention.

Changing an existing Key Value instance's persistence mode triggers a restart, during which your instance is unavailable for a few seconds. Note that if you change your mode to or from Off, your instance's data is lost after the restart.

Changing compute plans

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

Note all of the following before you upgrade:

• It is not currently possible to downgrade a Key Value instance.
• Your instance will be unavailable for a minute or two during the upgrade.
• Upgrading requires a restart. This can result in data loss based on your instance's persistence mode.
  • Free instances don't support data persistence, so their data is always lost on upgrade.

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.

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.