smart_open VS Sidekiq

We’re using smart_open, which is an amazing library that lets you open objects in S3 (and other cloud object stores) as if they’re files on your filesystem. It’s obviously critical that we’re able to seek to an arbitrary position in an S3 file without first downloading the whole thing. We’ll assume you’re using Poetry, but you should be able to follow along with any other package manager:

If you didn’t follow along with the first article in this series, you should be able to follow this article with your own dataset as long as you install smart_open and Meadowrun. smart_open is an amazing library that lets you open objects in S3 (and other cloud object stores) as if they’re files on your filesystem, and Meadowrun makes it easy to run your Python code on the cloud.

I see that you're primarily looking into Python work, so I'd recommend `smart_open` as a nice, compact way to get started.

https://github.com/RaRe-Technologies/smart_open

You want smart_open. It gives you a (more complete) file-like interface to many different storage systems, including s3. You can read and seek as needed.

See also smart_open: https://github.com/RaRe-Technologies/smart_open which might be more user-friendly? Never used it myself but it was on HN before. Discussion on their bugtracker: https://github.com/RaRe-Technologies/smart_open/issues/579

I'd say Sidekiq is the top competitor here.

There's something wrong at Redislabs, it took them over a year to get RESP3 rolled out into their hosted service, you'd expect a rollout of that to be a bit quicker when they're the owner of Redis.

It affected us when upgrading Sidekiq to version 7, which dropped support for older Redis, and their Envoy proxy setup didn't support HELLO and RESP3: https://github.com/sidekiq/sidekiq/issues/5594

That depends on how the `maxmemory-policy` is configured, and queue systems based on Redis will tell you not to allow eviction. https://github.com/sidekiq/sidekiq/wiki/Using-Redis#memory (it even logs a warnings if it detects your Redis is misconfigured IIRC).

Sidekiq https://sidekiq.org/: This one started as an open source project, once it got enough traction, the developer made a premium version of it, and makes money by selling licenses to businesses.

Sidekiq will drop in-progress jobs when a worker crashes. Sidekiq Pro can recover those jobs but with a large delay. Sidekiq is excellent overall but it’s not suitable for processing critical jobs with a low latency guarantee.

https://github.com/sidekiq/sidekiq/wiki/Reliability

> I'm not sure feature withholding has traditionally worked out well in the developer space.

I think it's worked out well for Sidekiq (https://sidekiq.org). I really like their model of layering valuable features between the OSS / Pro / Enterprise licenses.

I was studying Sidekiq's page on rate limiters. The first type of rate limiting mentioned is the concurrent limiter: only n tasks are allowed to run at any point in time. Note that this is independent of time units (e.g. per second), or how long they take to run. The only limitation is the number of concurrent tasks/requests.

The code above isn't idempotent. If you run it twice, it will create two copies, which is probably not what you intended. Why is this important? Because most backend job processors like Sidekiq don't make any guarantees that your jobs will run exactly once.