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How to Design Gaming Leaderboards with Redis Sorted Sets in AWS

Author

Govardhana M K
August 14, 2025

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🧠 DEEP DIVE USE CASE

How to Design Gaming Leaderboards with Redis Sorted Sets in AWS

From internal performance leaderboards to gaming apps leaderboards, gamification is the most common use case cloud engineers today come across.

Imagine you are asked to design a gaming leaderboard like this in AWS. What would be the core component?

Sample leaderboard breakdown

My pick would be ‘Redis Sorted Sets’. Before that..

Why Redis?

Leaderboards demand real time updates and instant rank retrievals as player scores change constantly during a match. Traditional relational databases struggle here because sorting large datasets on every query is expensive in both CPU and latency.

How Redis works ?

Redis excels because:

  • In memory storage → Sub millisecond read/write performance.

  • Sorted Set data structure → Automatically maintains ranking order without extra queries or manual sorting.

  • Atomic operations → Score updates and rank recalculations happen in a single step, preventing inconsistencies.

  • High concurrency handling → Can handle thousands of score updates per second without locking overhead.

  • Simple commands for leaderboard logic → Fetch top players, individual ranks, or score deltas with minimal code.

In AWS, deploying via Amazon ElastiCache for Redis adds managed scalability, failover, backups, and monitoring, so you focus on the leaderboard logic, not the infrastructure.

❝

ZADD, ZREVRANGE, and ZREVRANK are part of Redis’s Sorted Set operations. They handle score updates, ranked retrievals, and position lookups directly in-memory, meaning no extra sorting logic is required in your application code.

With this basic rationale and understanding, let us dig deep visually into AWS architecture, how Redis Sorted Sets work in the backend, and practical implementation nuances.

AWS Architecture

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