13 Years Later – Does Redis Need a New Architecture?

Redis, a widely used in-memory datastore, is often compared to alternative architectures like KeyDB and Dragonfly. While these projects bring interesting technologies and ideas, Redis maintains its position as the best in class for an in-memory, real-time datastore due to its architecture principles. Redis scales horizontally by running multiple processes (using Redis Cluster) even within a single cloud instance. This allows for linear scaling, faster replication, and quick recovery from VM failure. Additionally, limiting each Redis process to a reasonable size ensures efficient memory management and easy cluster manipulation. Horizontal scaling is crucial as it provides better resiliency, easier scaling, cost-effectiveness, and high throughput. The shared-nothing, multi-process architecture of Redis offers the best performance, scalability, and resilience while supporting various deployment architectures required by an in-memory, real-time data platform.