Redis source code will continue to be available for free to developers, customers, and partners through the Redis Community Edition. Future Redis source-available releases will unify core Redis and Redis Stack—including features like search, JSON, vector, probabilistic, and time series data models—into a single, downloadable, and easy-to-use package.

This will make it easy for anyone to use Redis in various environments, including as a high-performance key/value and document store, a powerful query engine, and a low-latency vector database that supports generative AI applications.

Under the new license, cloud service providers hosting Redis products will no longer be permitted to use Redis source code for free. For example, cloud providers will only be able to offer Redis 7.4 after agreeing to license terms with Redis (the maintainers of the code). These agreements will ensure continued support for existing integrated solutions and provide comprehensive access to upcoming Redis innovations.

“Our collaboration will continue to support integrated solutions like Azure Cache for Redis and provide Microsoft customers exclusive access to advanced Redis features.”
— Julia Liuson, President, Developer Division, Microsoft

In practice, nothing changes for the Redis developer community. Users can continue to enjoy the permissive licensing under dual licenses. At the same time, all Redis client libraries maintained by Redis will remain open source. Redis will continue to support its vast partner ecosystem—including managed service providers and systems integrators—and offer exclusive access to all future versions, updates, and features developed through its partner program. There are no changes for existing Redis Enterprise customers.

The new licensing approach aims to strike the best balance between widely providing Redis source code, supporting the developer community with minimal restrictions, and preserving Redis’s ability to continue investing in feature-rich free software and enterprise products. As always, the Redis team, community, customers, and partners will continue leading the development and deployment of Redis as a leading real-time data platform.

Q&A on the Redis Licensing Change

1. What change did Redis make?

Starting with Redis v7.4, Redis is transitioning from the BSD 3-Clause License to a dual license model for its core software using either the Redis Source Available License version 2 (RSALv2) or the Server Side Public License version 1 (SSPLv1). This dual licensing will apply to all future versions of Redis.

RSALv2 is a permissive, non-copyleft license that grants rights to “use, copy, distribute, provide, and prepare derivative works of the software” with only two main restrictions. Under RSALv2, users may not:

Commercialize the software or offer it as a hosted service to others;

Remove or obscure any license, copyright, or other notices.

To be clear, RSALv2 and SSPL are not OSI-approved licenses and come with their own limitations. In short, RSALv2 imposes certain restrictions on the commercialization of the software, while SSPLv1 requires anyone offering the product as a service to publicly release any modifications and management code under SSPL.

Other Redis-related components (such as language-specific client libraries, Terraform and Pulumi providers, etc.) are not affected by this change.

Additionally, starting with Redis 8, new data types and processing engines that were previously licensed under RSALv2 or SSPLv1 as part of Redis Stack will be included in the core product and will no longer be distributed separately.

2. Why make this change?

Redis wants all developers to have access to its best technologies. By adopting this license, Redis can better manage the commercial use of its source code while continuing to invest in a thriving practitioner community—some of whom are also contributors—without limiting their ability to work.

3. What is the impact on end users of the Redis open source product?

For end users using Redis open source versions for internal or personal use, or using new versions under the dual license, there is no change.

4. What is the impact on third-party libraries using Redis?

There is no change for integration partners building client libraries or other integrations on top of Redis.

5. What is the impact on Redis commercial customers?

There is no change for Redis commercial customers. These customers receive Redis technology under separately negotiated license terms.

6. Who is affected by the change?

Organizations offering competitive products based on Redis will no longer be permitted to use new Redis source code versions for free under either of the dual licenses. Commercial licensing terms are available to enable use cases beyond the RSALv2 or SSPLv1 license limitations.

7. What does Redis define as a “competitive product” under RSALv2 or SSPLv1?

A “competitive product” refers to a product sold to third parties—such as through paid support agreements—that is derived from Redis’s codebase and significantly overlaps with Redis’s commercial products. This includes hosting or embedding Redis as part of a solution that competes with Redis Enterprise Software or Redis Cloud. Custom license terms are available to provide additional clarity and support use cases that exceed the RSALv2 or SSPLv1 restrictions.

The post Major Shift! Redis Says Goodbye to OSI-Defined Open Source first appeared on DKM Ecosystem.

High-Performance Business Drivers

Real-Time Analytics

In everyday life, when users interact with applications, the new generation of apps often tell users things like:
“We noticed you like X, we think you might also like Y.”
Or when users make a selection or a purchase, they receive suggestions like:
“Many of our users who chose A were happiest when they also chose C. We thought you should know.”
Or even:
“You just booked Q — here are some reviews for R, which you might want to check out afterward.”

These smart applications offer timely and contextually relevant suggestions while users are still engaged, providing opportunities to enhance user experience and satisfaction. Offers made at this moment are much more effective than cold emails or calls made days later.

This level of smart interaction also greatly enhances user experience — for instance, a user who just booked a ticket to “Second City Chicago” might appreciate being shown discounted dining options nearby before the show. From a business perspective, delivering a superior experience can retain loyal customers who might otherwise be lured away by competitors offering better service.

The “smartness” of an application can also include detecting unusual behaviors that signal various types of fraud, from gaming fraud to identity fraud or promotional abuse. Successful detection must happen before users finish fraudulent actions, which demands real-time behavioral analysis.

Thanks to the increasing availability of inexpensive computing power, data processing tools, and learning frameworks, integrating “intelligence” into applications is more achievable than ever. However, adding intelligence without sacrificing application performance or responsiveness is critical.

Especially for customer-facing applications, users expect responses within 100 milliseconds. Considering that Internet round-trip times can take up to 50 ms, the application must complete processing, data access, and response generation within 50 ms.

To meet this requirement at scale, the database must deliver sub-millisecond response times under any load. In addition, real-time analysis must happen at the same speed and in the same operations as transactional processing — meaning in-database analytics is essential.

Redis’ Analytical Capabilities

Redis is an in-memory database platform renowned for its high performance, extreme versatility of data structures, and modular extensibility for all types of processing, analysis, and storage use cases.

Performance:
Redis has been benchmarked to process one million operations per second with sub-millisecond latency on ordinary AWS instances. When it comes to end-to-end application throughput and latency, Redis easily outperforms every other NoSQL database on the market with minimal resource usage.

Data Structures:
The real power behind Redis’ analytics lies in its rich data structures: Sets, Sorted Sets, Hashes, Lists, Strings, Bitmaps, and HyperLogLogs. These structures not only allow flexible data storage but also provide built-in operations for performing complex in-memory analytics.

Example: Sorted Sets
Sorted Sets store members ordered by scores. Retrieving members by score range is trivial, making them ideal for time-series data, real-time bidding, purchase volume rankings, most viewed articles, highest scores, and more.

Thanks to their native implementation in Redis, Sorted Sets enable highly efficient operations like sorting, range queries, range counting, and set operations (intersection, union, etc.) — all performed with maximum simplicity and speed.
Using Sorted Sets for analytics, such as time-series analysis, can be 10–100x faster than using traditional key-value or disk-based databases.

Other Redis data structures offer similar capabilities for analytics:

• Geo Data structures enable geospatial data analysis and distance calculation.

• HyperLogLog offers probabilistic cardinality estimation with minimal memory usage even for millions of items.

Combined with features like Pub/Sub, key expiration, list operations (push, pop), and increment/decrement commands, Redis allows developers to assemble their applications like building blocks.

Redis also supports embedded Lua scripting, extending the complexity and scope of analytics you can perform natively inside Redis.

Redis Modules further expand Redis’ capabilities, including:

• neural-redis: Native feed-forward neural networks

• Redis-ML: Machine learning models as a Redis service

• RediSearch: Full-text search and secondary indexing

• ReJSON: JSON data manipulation

• RedisGraph: Graph database capabilities

• TopK, Count-Min Sketch, ReBloom: Probabilistic data structures for advanced analytics

Redis Use Cases in Transactions and Analytics

Modern smart applications rely on Redis for its ability to perform real-time transactions and analytics simultaneously, without compromising speed or functionality.

1. Personalized Recommendations

Personalization typically involves:

• User profiles (history, location, demographics, preferences)

• Business rules for offers (conversion goals, segmentation, behavior context)

Redis serves as the transactional store capturing user actions in real-time, while simultaneously enabling high-speed updates to user profiles and real-time calculations like counting, scoring, and ranking to trigger dynamic personalized offers — all with sub-millisecond latency.

Sorted Sets in Redis allow rapid similarity scoring, enabling the right recommendation to be presented instantly.

2. Machine Learning Predictions

For dynamic correlations within user behavior, machine learning models are often trained offline with frameworks like Spark or TensorFlow. However, traditional models stored on disk are too slow for real-time predictions.

Redis-ML allows you to store, retrieve, execute, and update machine learning models directly in memory, achieving the scale and speed needed for online inference within 50 ms.
It supports multiple ML models (Random Forests, Logistic Regression, Gradient Boosting Trees) and enables applications written in different languages to access models simultaneously.

For simple feed-forward neural networks, neural-redis provides an open-source Redis module for in-memory neural network operations.

3. Fraud Detection

Fraud detection systems must process millions of data points and inline millions of customer transactions for maximum effectiveness.

Redis, with its:

• High performance

• Stream data processing (via Pub/Sub, Lists)

• Built-in analytics (Sets, HyperLogLog)

• Geospatial and graph analysis (Geo, RedisGraph modules)

becomes the natural choice for real-time fraud detection where application latency must stay within 100ms.

Fraud detection solutions benefit from Redis’ capabilities for:

• Fast session updates (Hashes)

• Queue/job management (Lists)

• Immediate alerting and notification (Pub/Sub)

• Integrated machine learning inference (Redis-ML)

“Using Redis Enterprise in our fraud detection services has been a phenomenal decision. It allowed us to manage tens of billions of transactions daily while scaling with our exponential growth, and speeding up fraud detection for all customers.” — Ravi Sandepudi, Engineering Lead, Simility

4. Interactive Reporting

When users interactively generate reports from millions of records, they expect data retrieval in 10ms and pagination in 3ms.

Large data stores cannot meet this need alone. Redis acts as a high-speed intermediate data store with pre-sorted Sorted Sets, enabling ultra-low latency even when handling millions of records.

Redis is often used alongside RDBMS and large NoSQL databases (e.g., HBase, Cassandra) to deliver high throughput and low latency user experiences.

Managing Terabytes of Data in Redis

Running in-memory, Redis faces two common challenges:

1. How to scale Redis

2. How to manage large volumes of data efficiently

Scaling Redis with High Availability:

• Redis is single-threaded, but scales horizontally by sharding (partitioning data across multiple instances).

• Redis can operate in persistent mode with multi-rack/region/datacenter/cloud replication for high availability.

Using Redis Enterprise software, you can create shared memory pools across a cluster of servers automatically for seamless scaling and high availability.

The post Using Redis for real-time analytics — the choice of many leading companies! first appeared on DKM Ecosystem.

User experience is absolutely the core of the gaming industry! If gaming companies wish to gain a competitive edge in the digital world, they must create unique and dynamic control experiences to attract and retain customers. To support highly personalized interactions, content caching, user session management, scoring, ranking, leaderboards, social engagement, messaging, notifications, real-time analytics, and high-speed transactions, Redis is the preferred database to help gaming companies achieve their goals.

Whether improving player engagement or optimizing backend performance, Redis Enterprise empowers gaming companies to deliver exceptional experiences. With its efficiency and versatility in enabling real-time engagement at scale, Redis simplifies the process of deploying and scaling across cloud environments closest to players—meeting critical gaming demands while ensuring outstanding gameplay.

Today, we’ll explore nine gaming use cases powered by Redis Enterprise and discover how it drives global game launches!

Use Case · Player Engagement
Leaderboards & Rankings

Massively scalable multiplayer games face challenges in distributed computing and instant visibility—who’s leading, by how much, and for how long. Leaderboards are often used to gamify platforms, enhancing user experience. Redis’ Sorted Sets are perfectly suited for leaderboard implementation, making Redis a popular choice for many gaming applications.

Figure 1: Tracking user progress via rankings, scores, and leaderboards

Jelly Button Games Ltd, a subsidiary of Playtika, designs and develops free-to-play multiplayer games. They use Redis Enterprise for caching, session storage, real-time leaderboard tracking, messaging, and more. Redis Enterprise helps Jelly Button Games reduce costs, minimize downtime, and improve performance, stability, and time-to-market.

Personalization

Gaming apps can leverage Redis Enterprise to collect and process vast amounts of in-game data, segment gameplay variations, and quickly identify optimal configurations. Rapid user acquisition and sustained retention require delivering the right content in milliseconds. Redis Enterprise’s ultra-fast throughput, low latency, and built-in analytics enable rich experiences that drive conversions, engagement, and user acquisition.

Figure 2: Fast data ingestion, content delivery, and instant analytics for personalization

Community & Matchmaking

Whether forming teams or battling opponents in a battle royale, effective matchmaking pairs compatible players in real time—a key element in building gaming communities. Players don’t want to wait. Redis Enterprise processes millions of matchmaking requests simultaneously with sub-millisecond latency, enabling smart algorithms that factor in location, player ratings, and more. The result? Seamless matches against equally skilled opponents.

Figure 3: Using search, queries, and Redis servers to manage matchmaking queues and return results in real time.

Inventory Management

Game inventories—including in-game currency, stores, and character catalogs—must always be available to players. Redis Enterprise combines in-memory architecture with scalability and persistence, allowing gaming companies to respond in real time and display any inventory catalog instantly. This translates to better player experiences and increased monetization.

Figure 4: Using search, queries, and Redis Streams to serve inventory from document storage in real time.

Use Case · Backend Performance Optimization

Caching
Redis caching is a critical technique for game developers—delivering graphics, images, thumbnails, music, metadata, and tags at lightning speed. It’s the most cost-effective way to achieve ultra-responsive mobile and gaming experiences.

Redis is ideal for caching not only because of its speed but also due to features like diverse data structures, customizable expiration, eviction policies, smart caching, pipelining, persistence, and high availability. Redis Enterprise’s high-availability caching ensures uninterrupted user experiences even during outages.

Figure 5: Using caching to deliver graphics, images, thumbnails, and metadata at lightning speed.

High-Speed Transactions
Games rely on Redis’ low-latency capabilities to handle high-performance, large-scale data processing—especially when data arrives in massive volumes at high speeds.

Game operations, account authentication, media purchases, content downloads, and other transactions require Redis’ impressive performance with tunable consistency and durability. Redis Enterprise enables multi-operation command execution with adjustable consistency and persistence, facilitating high-speed transactions. Applications like bid management benefit from built-in analytics (e.g., highest bid or bid range) using Redis Sorted Sets.

Figure 6: Achieving consistency and durability in high-speed transactions

Etermax, the studio behind Trivia Crack and Pictionary Online, faced limitations with its open-source Redis setup. To overcome CPU bottlenecks, scalability issues, and high costs, they migrated to Redis Enterprise.

Session Storage
Redis Enterprise is the ideal database for caching and session storage, offering high availability and persistence with in-memory replication. It serves both purposes in a single setup, as shown below.

Figure 7: Designing caching and session storage with Redis Enterprise

Real-Time Analytics

Real-time analytics give gaming companies a unified view of in-game events—from player segmentation to targeted promotions and status reporting. With countless concurrent events, Redis Enterprise’s responsiveness powers real-time dashboards that maintain high performance while delivering actionable insights.

Figure 8: Combining Redis Streams with multiple modules for real-time customization and game understanding.

Cheat Detection

Identifying bad actors who disrupt communities is more critical than ever—while avoiding false positives that penalize legitimate players. Speed and accuracy are equally vital. Redis Enterprise’s sub-millisecond latency processes millions of events simultaneously, enabling precise cheat detection in real time.

Figure 9: Redis Streams and Sorted Sets combined with search and query modules for real-time cheat analysis.

Redis Enterprise: The Best Deployment Choice for Gaming Companies

For gaming companies, downtime directly impacts revenue and customer experience, making true high availability a critical database requirement. Beyond availability, databases must seamlessly scale to handle traffic spikes. Redis Enterprise enhances Redis deployments with:

Zero-downtime scaling and clustering

World-class high availability, including persistence, cross-rack/zone/region replication, instant failover, backups, and disaster recovery

Performance is another key factor. Games must remain responsive even during peak traffic—ideally at the lowest cost. Benchmarked at 1.5 million operations per second with 1ms latency on a standard AWS EC2 instance, Redis Enterprise delivers consistent high performance, linear scaling, and minimized operational costs.

Born in the cloud-native era, Redis uniquely enables multi-cloud, hybrid, and global data unification to maximize business potential.

Redis Enterprise can be deployed as:

A fully managed service on cloud/PaaS (Redis Enterprise Cloud)

Downloadable software in your data center, VPC, or hybrid environments

Cost-efficient flash storage (70% lower cost than RAM) for high-throughput, low-latency large-scale datasets

Redis Enterprise eliminates operational burdens related to scaling, high availability, and Redis management while maintaining full compatibility with open-source Redis.

Figure 10: Only Redis Enterprise offers Active-Active geo-distribution based on Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs).

Data: The Lifeline of Every Business

Redis helps organizations reimagine how quickly they can process, analyze, predict, and act on data. By offering open-source and enterprise-grade data platforms, Redis powers real-time, experience-driven applications at any scale—delivering a competitive edge.

Redis Enterprise Software is a self-managed data platform for deploying real-time applications with full data control. Compared to high-cost alternatives, it offers unmatched affordability, speed, compliance, reliability, and resilience—unlocking Redis’ full potential for enterprises.

The post Database Use Case | Redis Enterprise, the Best Deployment Choice for Gaming Companies! first appeared on DKM Ecosystem.

What is Redis, and why has it become so widely used and a preferred database choice?

Since its launch over a decade ago, Redis has grown into one of the most popular databases worldwide. In daily life, when we access e-commerce or gaming platforms, there’s a good chance these applications rely on Redis behind the scenes. So, what exactly is Redis, and why has it gained such widespread adoption as a go-to database?

While many may have heard of Redis or even used it briefly, its true power and versatility often go underestimated.

Let’s dive into Redis systematically!

What is Redis?

Redis is an open-source (BSD-licensed), in-memory data structure store used as a database, cache, and message broker. It supports strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets, and more, along with features like range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, and geospatial indexing with radius queries.

Database: An organized collection of information for easy access, management, and updates.

Cache: A component that stores data to serve future requests faster, either as precomputed results or copies of data stored elsewhere.

Message Broker: An intermediary that translates messages between different protocols for senders and receivers.

Redis often starts as a cache layer for SQL or NoSQL disk-based databases, storing query results or temporary computations. What sets it apart is its ability to persist data to disk and offer high availability through in-memory replication and automatic failover.

Many enterprises use Redis to store high-speed data that isn’t retained elsewhere. For example:

As a primary database for fast-processing needs.

As a user-facing database for real-time services, with slower secondary databases for transaction history.

Use Case:

A major bank offering Apple Pay services uses Redis to store transaction parameters during Apple Pay sessions. These parameters are accessed at ultra-high speeds and exist solely in Redis for the session duration—showcasing Redis as a database.

Redis also serves as a message broker, where published messages are channeled to interested subscribers. Its pub/sub mechanism, combined with data structures like lists, makes it ideal for real-time notifications and performance-critical messaging.

Redis Data Structures

Redis’ versatility stems from its rich data structures, each optimized for specific use cases, enabling low-latency, atomic operations with minimal coding overhead.

Strings: Basic key-value storage with direct operations like numeric increments and string manipulations.

Hashes: Field-value pairs ideal for modeling structured data (e.g., user sessions, JSON documents).

Lists: Linked strings enabling fast insertions/deletions, perfect for queues and producer-consumer patterns.

Sets: Unordered collections of unique strings, great for deduplication, tagging, and membership checks.

Sorted Sets: Members sorted by scores, ideal for leaderboards, time-series data, and real-time bidding.

Geospatial Indexes: Sorted sets with geocoordinates for location-based searches (e.g., navigation).

Bitmaps/Bitfields: Memory-efficient counters for tracking binary states (e.g., user online status).

HyperLogLog: Probabilistic cardinality estimation with minimal memory usage.

These structures make Redis uniquely powerful for real-time analytics, session storage, and more, outperforming traditional SQL/NoSQL solutions.

User Praise:

“Redis’ data structures are unmatched—simple key/value, hashes for document-like data, and sorted sets for rankings. Plus, disk persistence is a game-changer!”

“I use Redis for chat systems, leaderboards, and even as a MySQL cache. Migrating from Memcached was a no-brainer.”

For advanced use cases, Redis supports Lua scripting for complex computations and queries.

How Enterprises Use Redis
Real-world applications highlight Redis as a database, cache, and message broker:

Operational & Analytical Database:

Cooladata uses Redis for real-time user session analytics, storing summaries in MongoDB/HDFS for historical analysis.

Trading, Analytics & Messaging:

Xignite leverages Redis for fast market data access and pub/sub interfaces.

Time-Series Data:

An options trading platform delivers price updates (100+ pairs, 10 changes/sec) with 1ms latency to hundreds of subscribers.

Primary Operational Database:

A telecom giant handles 5M+ ops/sec at 5ms latency for billing apps.

Ad platforms use Redis for real-time content delivery based on demographics.

Reporting & Analytics:

A healthcare LMS achieves sub-second sorting and <5ms pagination using hashes and sorted sets.

With countless global users, Redis’ applications are limitless—from e-commerce to IoT.

Why Redis?

Redis isn’t just a cache or database—it’s a multi-role solution for an era demanding faster data processing. Its in-memory architecture delivers unmatched speed, while features like persistence, scalability, and high availability make it enterprise-ready.

Cost-Efficiency: Redis Enterprise offers a self-managed platform for real-time apps, balancing performance, compliance, and elasticity at a competitive cost.

In short, Redis is the backbone of modern, data-driven applications—where speed and reliability are non-negotiable.

The post How Enterprises Use Redis | Do You Really Understand Redis? An Introduction to Redis Data Structures first appeared on DKM Ecosystem.