Redis is an open source, advanced key-value store that can be used for caching, sessions, publishing/subscribing, job queues, and more. It supports atomic operations, ordered lists, sets, hashes and sorted sets. Data can be saved to disk for persistence. Redis has client libraries for many languages like Node.js and can be accessed via a command line interface. Popular use cases include caching application data to improve performance, storing sessions to allow user authentication across requests, and processing jobs asynchronously in the background via pub/sub and queues.