Redis Caching & Data Structures AI Skill Guide

Overview & Engine Architecture

Redis is a single-threaded (per shard) in-memory data structure server: strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets, streams. It excels at cache, rate limits, coordination, and lightweight queues—but eviction ≠ persistence and cache ≠ system of record unless durability is explicitly engineered.

App -> Redis (standalone / Sentinel / Cluster)
         |- TTL + maxmemory-policy (eviction)
         |- optional RDB snapshots + AOF log
         |- ACL users / TLS (managed offerings)
         |- replication buffer (not counted in maxmemory)

When to use / when not to

Use when