The app we use for analytics currently works by logging events to the file system and loading them into a mysql database every 5 minutes. I'm trying to convince our sysadmin to let me switch the backend out to use redis, since the only thing I'm using sql for is date filtering.

The main roadblock for him is redis' lack of support for automatic failover (at least for the python client libraries I've seen), which I admit has some validity to it. I don't think it's that big of an issue for our use case, but try telling that to an opinionated sysadmin.