Roadmap & Future Enhancements

Redistill focuses on being the fastest single-instance Redis-compatible key-value store. This page aggregates planned features and areas of active exploration from the upstream docs.

Planned areas

Near-term enhancements (high priority)

These are features and improvements called out as high priority in the Architecture and Features documentation. Status may evolve; check the GitHub repository for the latest state.

  • Additional string commands – APPEND, STRLEN, and INCRBYFLOAT to round out the string API.
  • Expanded hash operations – additional commands such as HDEL, HKEYS, HVALS, HLEN, HEXISTS, HMSET, and HMGET to complement the existing HSET/HGET/HGETALL.
  • Production integrations – deeper integration with monitoring stacks like Prometheus for high-cardinality metrics and dashboards.
  • Additional benchmarking & tuning guides – more real-world workloads beyond synthetic benchmarks, with step-by-step tuning recipes.

Status: Planned / in progress. See the GitHub issues and milestones for up-to-date details.

Medium-term roadmap

These items expand Redistill's capabilities while staying true to its performance-first focus.

Data structures & commands

  • Basic lists – operations like LPUSH, RPUSH, LPOP, RPOP, and LRANGE for queue-style workloads that still benefit from extremely fast in-memory operations.
  • Basic sets – operations such as SADD, SMEMBERS, SREM for membership tracking and simple uniqueness constraints.
  • Client introspection – CLIENT commands (list/kill) to assist with operational debugging and connection management.
  • Pub/Sub – foundational publish/subscribe support (PUBLISH, SUBSCRIBE, PSUBSCRIBE) for lightweight messaging patterns where full message-broker features are not required.

Scaling & distribution

  • Clustering support – built-in sharding and cluster awareness as a complement to today's client-side or proxy-based sharding strategies.
  • Replication – optional master–replica replication for read scaling and high availability, with careful evaluation of the performance trade-offs.

Status: Planned. Exact APIs and trade-offs will be designed to preserve Redistill's performance focus.

Long-term research & performance work

The Architecture doc outlines several deeper performance and systems topics that are being explored for future versions.

  • DPDK and kernel-bypass networking – investigate bypassing the kernel networking stack for even lower tail latency and higher packet throughput.
  • NUMA-awareness – better placement of threads and data on multi-socket machines to reduce cross-node memory traffic and improve cache locality.
  • jemalloc tuning – fine-tuned allocator settings and potential huge-page usage to improve memory throughput and fragmentation characteristics.
  • CPU pinning & affinity – mapping worker threads to specific cores to reduce context switching and improve predictability.

Status: Exploratory / research. These changes will only land if they provide clear wins without sacrificing usability.

TLS & security enhancements

The TLS implementation summary highlights several future improvements on top of the existing Rustls-based TLS support.

  • Mutual TLS (mTLS) – client certificate authentication for stronger authentication in zero-trust and multi-tenant environments.
  • Certificate reloading – hot reloading of TLS certificates and keys without process restarts, ideal for Let's Encrypt and automated rotations.
  • Cipher suite control – configuration of allowed cipher suites and protocol versions beyond the secure defaults.
  • TLS-aware metrics – visibility into TLS versions, cipher usage, and error rates in operational metrics.
  • ACME integration – potential built-in support for obtaining and renewing certificates from Let's Encrypt and similar providers.

Status: Planned enhancements on top of the current, production-ready TLS stack.

Observability & monitoring

Monitoring is already available via the INFO command and HTTP health endpoint, but the docs call out additional observability work.

  • First-class Prometheus integration – native metrics endpoints optimised for Prometheus scraping, with clear naming and labels.
  • Dashboards & alerts – reference dashboards for Grafana and recommended alerts for memory, evictions, connection rejections, and throughput anomalies.

Status: Planned. In the meantime, you can export metrics via the health endpoint and custom collectors.

Contributing to the roadmap

Redistill is an open source project. The roadmap is intentionally shaped by real-world usage and contributor feedback.

  • GitHub Issues – propose features, report performance results, or discuss trade-offs: see the repository's Issues tab.
  • Discussions – share ideas, architectures and benchmarks that could influence future work.
  • Pull requests – contributions are welcome; please open an issue first for larger changes, and include tests and documentation where possible.

For questions or potential collaborations, you can also reach the maintainer directly on the Contact page.