I know some people use Akka with Persistence module, but I would welcome other alternatives.
Reliable and durable? Emphatically not Redis, and at that point you probably want to just start looking at SQS.
(I've had good luck shipping products as docker-compose files, these days. Even to fairly backwards clients.)
It's something to be aware of and to have backup plans for, but we've been using Redis as our primary datastores for over a year with only one or two instance failures which were quickly resolved within minutes by failing over to replicas, with no data loss.