Materia KV

Materia is a new serverless databases offering by Clever Cloud. A whole range of services meeting the needs expressed by our customers in recent years, with an open and resilient approach. It includes deployment across multiple availability zones, compatibility with existing protocols, clients, and pay-as-you-go billing. It’s built on the FoundationDB open source transactional engine. A distributed and robust solution, notably thanks to its high simulation capacity.

Materia KV is the first publicly available product of this family. It’s a key-value database which comes with simplicity in mind. You have no instance size to choose, no storage capacity to worry about. We simply provide you with a host address, a port and a token: you’re ready to go! Once our servers send a reply message, your data is durable: it’s synchronously replicated over 3 data centers in Paris.

You don’t have to configure leaders, followers: high availability is included, by design.

Compatibility layers

We didn’t want this Materia KV to come at the cost of complex configuration, requiring the use of special clients and ORMs. That’s why we’ve developed its compatibility layers. To “talk” to it, you don’t need a special API or tools specific to Clever Cloud. You’ll be able to use it with existing solutions for DynamoDB, GraphQL or Redis. The first available layer is compatible with Redis API (and its variants as Reddict or Valkey).

Thus, you can use a Materia KV add-on with any compatible client within your applications, redis-cli or alternatives such as iredis. You can also use it with graphical interface (GUI). We tested many of them with success:

• Another Redis Desktop Client
• PX3 Redis UI
• Qredis
• Redis Commander
• Redis Insight

Create a Materia KV add-on

You can create a Materia KV add-on as simply as any other Clever Cloud service in the Console, following this link. Select the Alpha plan (free during testing phase), an application to link to (or none), give it a name, and you’ll get access to its dashboard giving you connection details. Environment variables shared with a linked application are listed in the Service dependencies section.

We included them with the REDIS_ format. Thus, you can just try to replace a Redis instance by Materia KV. It’s as simple as linking the new add-on, unlinking the old one and restarting your application! (Check commands you’ll need first).

You can also use clever tools to create a Materia KV add-on and set environment variables to test it with a PING command:

clever addon create kv DATABASE_NAME
source <(clever addon env addon ADDON_ID -F shell)
redis-cli -h $KV_HOST -p $KV_PORT --tls PING

Here is an example of what you can expect:

$ clever addon create kv testKV

Add-on created successfully!
ID: addon_4997cfe3-f104-4d05-9fe4-xxxxxxxxx
Real ID: kv_01HV6NCSRDxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Name: testKV

/!\ The Materia KV provider is in Alpha testing phase, don't store sensitive or production grade data
You can easily use Materia KV with 'redis-cli', with such commands:
source <(clever addon env addon_4997cfe3-f104-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxx -F shell)
redis-cli -h $KV_HOST -p $KV_PORT --tls

You can also deploy Materia KV add-ons with Terraform provider (OpenTofu compatible).

Using the Redis API compatible layer

Environment variables and CLI usage

To connect to a Materia KV add-on, you need 3 parameters: the host, the port and a (biscuit based) token. You can set these parameters as environment variables by doing source <(clever addon env addon ADDON_ID -F shell). The variables set are:

• $KV_HOST and its alias $REDIS_HOST
• $KV_PORT and its alias $REDIS_PORT
• $KV_TOKEN and its alias $REDIS_PASSWORD
• $REDIS_CLI_URL
• $REDISCLI_AUTH

You can directly use these environment variables to connect to a Materia KV add-on using redis-cli if REDISCLI_AUTH is set:

redis-cli -h $KV_HOST -p $KV_PORT --tls

Materia KV is also compatible with alternatives such as iredis.

Fish shell users

If you use the Fish shell, you can use the following command to set the environment variables:

clever addon env ADDON_ID -F shell | source

Clever KV

We’re exploring how Clever Tools can natively support Materia KV and helps you to manage such add-ons without any additional software or configuration. We’ve enabled the clever kv command in a testing branch available here. You can download it as a binary and only need the KV_TOKEN environment variable to be set to use it, or target a specific add-on with the --addon option.

• Learn more about Clever KV

Demos and examples

We’ve prepared a few examples to help you get started with Materia KV:

• Materia KV Go client
• Materia KV raw TCP V demo
• Materia KV raw TCP Ruby demo

Supported types and commands

During this alpha stage, we don’t provide 100% compatibility with the Redis API. Currently supported value types are:

• String

Find below the list of currently supported commands: