Dragonfly

Judgement

What it is

Building block

What it does

An in-memory key-value store that speaks the Redis and Memcached protocols, using a multi-threaded design to serve more requests per machine.

Adopt it when

Your Redis instance is hitting the limits of a single core or a single large box and you would rather scale up one server than run a Redis cluster.

Watch out

It uses the Business Source License rather than an open-source license, so offering it as a managed service is restricted, and some Redis commands and modules are not covered.

Ready for

Production-ready

Runs as

Self-hosted server and cloud service

Built with

C++

How established

Established: started 4 years ago, latest release v2.1.

What the license allows

GitHub could not read the license. Check it in the repository before reusing any code.

Judged on 2026-11-06 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Built from

Follow it down: Dragonfly → LLVM project → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

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