Dragonfly 2023 in Review and Exciting Glimpses of 2024
Tags: database, redis
Published: 2024-01-03 17:00:00

As we edge closer to the start of a new year, we would like to express our sincere appreciation for the exceptional community that has been instrumental in shaping Dragonfly.
Your consistent support and constructive feedback motivate us to strive for greater achievements, and we look forward to navigating 2024 and beyond together.

Our commitment to the development of open features that serve the Redis community and the wider developer ecosystem remains firm.
We welcome and prioritize community-driven feature requests and bug fixes, recognizing the invaluable contributions that
help us achieve the goal of building the most efficient in-memory data store, designed with developers' needs in mind.

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## Looking Back at 2023

We released 19 new versions of Dragonfly in 2023, each packed with new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements.
Back in March, we hit our first big milestone with the release of [Dragonfly v1.0](https://www.dragonflydb.io/blog/dragonfly-production-ready),
demonstrating our commitment to delivering a production-ready database that is ready to scale with your applications.
Besides the release of v1.0, there are a few more highlights from the past year that we'd like to share with you.

### Lightning-Fast Performance and High Availability

We ignited a performance revolution early in the year.
Dive into our blog post on [turbocharging Dragonfly](https://www.dragonflydb.io/blog/scaling-performance-redis-vs-dragonfly) to explore how we designed Dragonfly to
deliver an exhilarating experience with lightning-fast response times and tremendously high throughput.
In the meantime, we also introduced snapshots and replications to ensure data durability and [high availability](https://www.dragonflydb.io/blog/replication-for-high-availability).

### Seamless Integrations with Popular Frameworks

Connecting to the broad Redis community was a major objective for us this year.
It serves our quest for compatibility and demonstrates how simple it is to scale and boost performance with Dragonfly.
Look back at the ways we grew over the past year through [integrations with popular frameworks such as BullMQ](https://www.dragonflydb.io/blog/running-bullmq-with-dragonfly-part-1-announcement).
BullMQ is a popular, robust, and fast Node.js library for creating and processing background jobs that uses Redis as a backend.
With high compatibility, Dragonfly can be used as a backend data store for BullMQ with no code changes.
Beyond this, we also [optimized Dragonfly for BullMQ](https://www.dragonflydb.io/blog/running-bullmq-with-dragonfly-part-2-optimization),
achieving an exceptional 30x throughput increase from the baseline.

Our latest integration looked at how we [integrated with Laravel](https://www.dragonflydb.io/blog/using-laravel-with-dragonfly-part-01-cache-and-queue),
one of the most popular web frameworks not just in PHP but across all languages, as the cache, session, and queue backend.
This again highlights Dragonfly's compatibility.
By simply changing the Redis connection string, you can use Dragonfly as a drop-in replacement for Redis in Laravel,
instantly benefiting from its high performance and throughput, low memory usage, and efficient snapshotting.

### Cloud-Native Deployment and Management

The [Dragonfly Kubernetes Operator](https://www.dragonflydb.io/blog/announcing-kubernetes-operator-general-availability)
release makes it extremely simple to deploy Dragonfly in Kubernetes environments.
This release offers benefits such as high availability with custom failover strategies, direct snapshots to cloud storage (e.g., S3),
seamless integration with cloud-native monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus and Grafana), and more.

### AI Revolution

2023 marked the beginning of the AI revolution with GPT-4 and other LLM models that will affect the future of our lives.
To connect businesses to the revolution, we [introduced Dragonfly Search](https://www.dragonflydb.io/blog/announcing-dragonfly-search),
which allows the storage, retrieval, and searching of AI-generated embeddings utilizing vector similarity search (VSS) capabilities.

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## A Glimpse of Dragonfly in 2024

### Dragonfly Cloud

Exciting developments await in the cloud!
We will continue to add features and functionality to [Dragonfly Cloud](https://www.dragonflydb.io/cloud) with the goal of giving developers the most scalable
and cost-effective managed Dragonfly service across multiple cloud providers.
Currently, Dragonfly Cloud is onboarding customers on a waitlist basis.
We aim to open up this highly anticipated service to the public in 2024.

### Hardware Efficiency and Persistence

We designed Dragonfly's multi-threaded architecture to be able to utilize modern cloud hardware much more efficiently than legacy solutions.
Recent advancements in SSD performance allow us to take efficiency to new levels.
We plan to deliver a solution where data is seamlessly shared between memory and SSD while still preserving sub-millisecond guarantees.
This will allow developers great flexibility while dramatically reducing the associated costs of maintaining their Dragonfly instances.

### Community Centric Development

In 2024, we're launching an array of community initiatives, including monthly office hours every second Wednesday of each month
and online workshops for you to learn and get up and running.
We want to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and collaborate on making Dragonfly the best it can be.

### Meet Us at Events Near You!

Dragonfly is taking to the skies in 2024, with a series of events around the globe.
Stay tuned for event announcements on our [events page](https://www.dragonflydb.io/events),
and let's make 2024 a year of in-person connections, insights, and shared enthusiasm.

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## Thank You

As we stand at the threshold of a new year, we're filled with gratitude for the amazing community that has made Dragonfly what it is today.
Your support and feedback drive us to reach new heights.
We can't wait to continue on this thrilling journey with the goal of building the most efficient in-memory data store in the universe.
Here's to innovating faster and building a future where Dragonfly continues to empower developers worldwide.

Farewell to 2023. Now, let's fasten our seatbelts and embark on the journey to make 2024 another year to remember!