Nodejs Azure Redis Cache hang forever and read ECONNRESET error

Question

I create a new Azure Redis Cache, which take almost 5 minutes to finish creating. I'm using the node-redis package, here's my code

var client = redis.createClient(
  process.env.REDIS_PORT || 6379,
  process.env.REDIS_HOST || '127.0.0.1'
);
if(process.env.REDIS_HOST) {
  client.auth(process.env.REDIS_KEY);
}

Yes those environment variables are properly set, it just hang on for a while and raise an error: Redis connection to mycache.redis.cache.windows.net:6380 failed - read ECONNRESET.

Now, when I use the redis-cli to try to connect with redis-cli -h myhost -p 6380 -a the-auth-key it just hang at the command line and no connection seems to be established, but no error either. It's just doing nothing. If I change the port etc, I get connection error. So I'm currently wondering what I'm doing wrong?

I've created another redis cache on a different region an plan (I took the biggest, with 99.9 SLA etc). Still, no connection is possible.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

New caches only have the SSL endpoint (port 6380) enabled by default. Some clients (like redis-cli) do not support SSL. You would need to check if node-redis supports SSL. You will get erorrs if you try to connect to the SSL port with a client that doesn't support SSL.

If you need to use a client does not support SSL, there are two options. One is to create an SSL tunnel between the local machine and the Redis cache, using an application like 'stunnel'. I know stunnel works well for ad-hoc scenarios like redis-cli, but I'm not sure how it would perform under production load.

The second option is to enable the non-SSL endpoint (port 6379) in the Azure portal. However, we don't recommend this for production caches since your access key and data will all be sent in plaintext.