I guess you have heard the name of Meltdown and Spectre already. If not, check out this site https://meltdownattack.com/. Definitely, it is not a good start of a New Year.
All Cloud providers are busy with patching the kernel of their underlying systems. AWS Elastic cache (Redis) is one of them. Due to its single threaded nature, it is one of the applications that are impacted most by the kernel patching.
I randomly checked a few Redis instances in our AWS accounts. I found that starting from early morning on 3/Jan or 4/Jan, the CPU usages of the Redis instances start to ramp up. If your applications use Redis, and you have noticed the slowness recently. It worth checking your Redis CPU to ensure is is still able to handle the load.
Jackie Chen's IT Workshop 