Redis Labs is integrating its enterprise platform as a hosted and managed database service on Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform. That integration includes built-in support for Red Hat's recently launched Kubernetes Operator.

The Redis Enterprise integration will allow customers to deploy and manage Redis databases as a stateful Kubernetes service. It will also allow users to run Redis Enterprise on premises or across any cloud environment.

Red Hat introduced the Kubernetes Operator as an open source project in May. It extends the Kubernetes API to allow for an easier way to configure and manage stateful applications. Those are applications that rely on stored functions to operate.

CoreOS, which Red Hat acquired earlier this year for $250 million, introduced the concept of an "operator" in late 2016. It’s basically a controller that runs Kubernetes for a particular application. It does this by using the Kubernetes API to handle the creation and management of application instances.

The operator concept is targeted at distributed applications. It allows for the scaling of instances as needed. It also supports the setting of policies in a declarative manner by telling the network what is needed and letting the operator execute the specific actions to get to that state.

The Red Hat integration comes as the Redis open source database platform recently surpassed 1 billion downloads on Docker. That growth has the platform well ahead of rival NoSQL platforms like MongoDB, Apache Cassandra, and ElasticSearch in terms of adoption. MongoDB, though, remains the segment champ in terms of market share.

Redis is a NoSQL high-speed memory database that allows applications to access necessary data in real-time. It can support the delivery of millions of requests per second with latency of less than 1 millisecond. This speed makes Redis a good match for container-based microservices.

For the container ecosystem, these database services provide stateful storage. This is crucial for applications that run in a container environment, which is natively stateless, but need to have immediate access to stored data.

NoSQL is a database type that is delivered in a distributed structure that allows for quicker set up and supports a more dynamic search method to access data. This is in contrast to more standard SQL databases that present their data sets in predefined columns and rows.

Redis Labs relies on Redis for its enterprise services. Redis Labs’ enterprise product runs on public clouds, on premises, and as part platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings.

Manish Gupta, chief marketing officer at Redis Labs, said Redis and Docker work well together because Redis can be containerized easily and orchestrated by Kubernetes. Gupta explained that Redis Labs does not provide support for the open source version of Redis. Instead, it builds Redis Enterprise on the Redis platform to make it more usable for enterprise customers.

Redis Enterprise also includes embedded search that relies on the data structure to provide faster search results. “This makes it very seamless for enterprises to scale,” Gupta said.

Redis was initially funded by VMware and today is officially sponsored by Redis Labs. The firm has raised $86 million in funding, with $44 million of that coming last year from Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital Ventures, Viola Ventures, and Dell Capital Technologies. Gupta said that Redis Labs has around 8,500 paying customers, including companies like American Express, Walmart, and Groupon.

Forrester Research ranked Redis Labs as a leader in its translytical data platform rankings late last year. Competitors in this category include SAP, Oracle, IBM, and DataStax.