Redis is an open source, in-memory data structure store that can be used as a database, cache, or message broker. It supports data structures like strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with ranges and pagination. Redis provides high performance due to its in-memory storage and support for different persistence options like snapshots and append-only files. It uses client/server architecture and supports master-slave replication, partitioning, and failover. Redis is useful for caching, queues, and other transient or non-critical data.