Redis is consistently one of the most beloved pieces of infrastructure for developers. And in the last few years, we've seen a number of new Redis-compatible projects that aim to improve on the core of Redis in some way.

One of those projects is DragonflyDB, a multi-threaded version of Redis that allows for significantly higher throughput on a single instance. Roman Gershman is the co-founder and CTO at Dragonfly, and he has a fascinating background. Roman initially worked at Google and then was a frustrated user of Redis while working as an engineer at a fast-growing startup. He did a stint on the ElastiCache team at AWS but struck off on his own to make a new, faster version of Redis.

In this episode, we talk through the improvements that Dragonfly makes to Redis and why it matters to high-scale users. We go through the different needs and requirements of high-scale cache applications and what Roman learned at AWS. We also go through the Redis licensing drama and how to attract developer attention in 2025.