We are now going to look at using Redis to store the current state of our application. Redis is a simple key-value store that uses the system memory. This means that it is fast. There are very short lookup times for values. Redis, being a key-value store, means that our data is stored very differently than in a relational database management system (RDBMS). Redis also allows connections either locally or remotely. This will allow us to scale our application as more web servers come online to utilize the data stored in Redis. Redis also has a simple message queue system that we will explore as well.
We will cover the following topics in this chapter:
Installing Redis
Using data structures in Redis
Using Redis in Node.js
Using Redis's publish/subscribe
Integrating Redis into our application