Architecture Teardown: Redis 8.0 Cluster Mode – Sharding vs. Dragonfly 1.20 Threading for High Throughput 2026 As we move into 2026, high-throughput in-memory data workloads are pushing the limits of legacy architectures. Two leading solutions dominate the conversation: Redis 8.0, with its mature Cluster Mode sharding, and Dragonfly 1.20, which leans on a shared-nothing threading model to deliver unprecedented per-node performance. This teardown compares their core architectures, performance tradeoffs, and ideal use cases for modern high-throughput deployments. Redis 8.0 Cluster Mode: Sharding for Horizontal Scale Redis has long relied on single-threaded event loops per node, a design that simplifies concurrency but limits per-node throughput to the speed of a single CPU core. Redis Cluster Mode, refined in the 8.0 release, solves this with horizontal sharding across multiple nodes. The cluster divides the keyspace into 16,384 fixed hash slots, with each node owning a subset of slots.…