Redis is an open source, in-memory data structure store that can be used as a database, cache, or message broker. It supports basic data types like strings, hashes, lists, and sets. Redis features high performance, replication, publishing/subscribing, and Lua scripting. It is widely adopted by companies like GitHub, StackOverflow, and Blizzard for use cases like caching, sessions, queues, and as a real-time database.