What are common real-world use cases for Redis?
Answer
Redis is versatile and used in many production scenarios. Caching: storing results of expensive database queries, API responses, or rendered HTML fragments to serve subsequent requests in microseconds. Session storage: web application sessions stored in Redis with a TTL, enabling stateless application servers and horizontal scaling. Rate limiting: using INCR with EXPIRE to count requests per IP per minute. Leaderboards: Sorted Sets power real-time game scoreboards with ZADD and ZRANGE. Queues and job management: Lists used as FIFO queues for background job processing (Laravel Queue, Sidekiq). Pub/Sub messaging: broadcasting real-time notifications to connected clients. Distributed locking: using SET NX EX to ensure only one process performs a critical operation at a time.