redis-clustering

Redis Clustering

Guidance for designing keys and routing reads in a sharded Redis Cluster (and in standalone primary/replica replication). Covers the two failure modes that bite most new cluster users: CROSSSLOT errors on multi-key operations, and overloading primaries with read traffic.

When to apply

• Designing keys for a Redis Cluster deployment.
• Debugging a CROSSSLOT error on MGET, SDIFF, transactions, or pipelines.
• Implementing transactions / Lua scripts that touch multiple keys.
• Scaling out read traffic without adding shards.

1. Hash tags for multi-key operations

Redis Cluster distributes keys across 16,384 slots by hashing the key name. Any command that touches multiple keys (MGET, SDIFF, SUNIONSTORE, transactions, Lua scripts with multiple KEYS[]) requires all keys to live on the same slot — otherwise the server returns a CROSSSLOT error.

Hash tags force this: the part between { and } is the only thing hashed for slot assignment, so two keys sharing a hash tag always land together.

# Same slot — multi-key ops work
redis.set("{user:1001}:profile",  "...")
redis.set("{user:1001}:settings", "...")
redis.lmove("{user:1001}:pending", "{user:1001}:processed", "LEFT", "RIGHT")

# Different keys, no hash tag — CROSSSLOT on multi-key commands in cluster mode
redis.set("user:1001:profile",  "...")
redis.set("user:1001:settings", "...")
pipe = redis.pipeline()
pipe.get("user:1001:profile")
pipe.get("user:1001:settings")
pipe.execute()

Cluster aware clients such as redis-py split a plain pipeline across nodes, so this batch fails with CROSSSLOT only when it runs as a transaction or when the same keys go into one multi-key command such as MGET. Some clients or proxies may still reject pipelines that span slots.

Rules of thumb:

• Use a tag scoped to the meaningful entity, e.g. {user:1001}. Avoid bare {1001} — unrelated namespaces (purchase:{1001}, employee:{1001}) would all collide on the same slot.
• Only tag where you actually need multi-key ops. Tagging everything creates hotspots and defeats the point of sharding.
• A single-key command on a hash-tagged key works fine, so adding tags later is incremental — but renaming keys in production is painful, so plan tagging up front for entities you'll group.
• Validate key parts built from user input before placing them in a hash tag: limit them to a known set of characters, or reject or encode curly braces, so input cannot change which part of the key is hashed.

See references/hash-tags.md.

2. Read replicas for read-heavy workloads

If reads dominate writes, route them to replicas to free primary capacity. Works both in Redis Cluster (each shard has 1+ replica) and in standalone primary/replica replication.

# Redis Cluster: enable replica reads on the client
from redis.cluster import RedisCluster

rc = RedisCluster(host="localhost", port=6379, read_from_replicas=True)
rc.set("key", "value")     # → primary
value = rc.get("key")       # → may be served by a replica

Newer redis-py releases deprecate this flag in favor of a load balancing strategy option; check the docs for your client version.

For non-cluster setups, point two clients at the right nodes:

primary = Redis(host="primary-host", port=6379)
replica = Redis(host="replica-host", port=6379)
primary.set("key", "value")
value = replica.get("key")

These examples leave out authentication and encryption for brevity. Real deployments should use a password or access control user and TLS, with credentials loaded from the environment or a secret store rather than written into code.

The trade-off is consistency: replicas are eventually consistent. Don't read your own writes from a replica; don't use replica reads for anything that requires strict freshness (financial balances, idempotency state). Good fits: cache layers, analytics, dashboards, recommendation feeds.

The replica read setting applies to every read on that client, so keep a separate replica reading client for caches and dashboards, and read sessions, auth tokens, rate limits, and idempotency keys through a client that reads only from the primary.

See references/read-replicas.md.

References

• Redis Cluster spec — hash tags
• Redis: multi-key operations in cluster
• Redis: Replication