Redis is used for storing all ephemeral (that's data you don't necessarily want to store permanently) user data, such as mapping of session IDs (stored in cookies) to current session variables at Cloudcraft.co. The many datastructures supported by Redis also makes it an excellent caching and realtime statistics layer. It doesn't hurt that the author, Antirez, is the nicest guy ever! These days, I would be really hard pressed to find any situation where I would pick something like Memcached over Redis. Redis