Banking and fintech apps
Security teams end all sessions of a compromised account, or of every device on an outdated app version, in one action.
Core dataWeb and mobile
Session Management
Store sessions with automatic expiry, and find or revoke them by user, role or device without building an index.
- lookup to find a user's sessions
- 1
- secondary indexes
- 0
- expiry, tags included
- Auto
Step 1 of 5
Sign in on three devices
Each device gets its own session with a 30 minute expiry.
Example sessionplaying
# Sign in on three devices
hotkv> SET session:9f2c "{\"user\":42}" EX 1800
OK
An animated walkthrough with real HotKV commands and example replies. Click any step to jump to it.
The problem
Sessions are small, hot and short-lived, which suits an in-memory store. The hard part comes later, when support needs to sign a user out everywhere, or security needs to end every session for a role or a device. A plain key-value store can only look up a session by its id.
How HotKV handles it
HotKV stores each session as a key with an expiry and lets you tag it with the user, role or device it belongs to. Tags are part of the engine and go away with the key, so you can list or revoke all matching sessions with one lookup instead of maintaining a parallel set of keys.
Step by step
What happens, command by command
- 01
Sign in on three devices
Each device gets its own session with a 30 minute expiry.
SET session:9f2c "{\"user\":42}" EX 1800 - 02
Tag each session
User, role and device are attached right after the session is created.
TAG.SET session:9f2c user:42 role:admin device:ios - 03
Stay signed in while active
Every request refreshes the expiry, which gives a sliding timeout.
EXPIRE session:9f2c 1800 - 04
Find every session of user 42
A stolen laptop is reported. One lookup returns all of the user's sessions.
TAG.MEMBERS user:42 - 05
Sign out everywhere
Delete the keys that came back. Their tags go with them, and every device is signed out.
DEL session:9f2c session:71aa session:0c8e
Where it fits
Real-world scenarios
SaaS products
When an admin's role is removed, every session tagged with that role is revoked at once.
Streaming services
Count and limit concurrent sessions per account from the TAG.MEMBERS reply for the user tag.
Built in
What you get
Automatic expiry
Sessions disappear on their own when the TTL runs out, and their tags go with them.
EXEXPIRELookup without an index
Find sessions by any tag, or by several tags at once.
TAG.MEMBERSTAG.INTERCheck tags quickly
TAG.COUNT and TAG.EXISTS tell you what a key carries.
TAG.COUNTTAG.EXISTSFast under login storms
Session reads and writes run on parallel threads.
Common questions
How do I log a user out of only one device?
Use TAG.INTER with the user tag and the device tag, then delete the keys it returns.
What happens to a tag when its session expires?
A key's tags go when the key does, including on expiry. Tags are not part of snapshots, so re-apply them if the server restarts from a snapshot.
Can I limit concurrent sessions per account?
Yes. TAG.MEMBERS on the user tag lists the sessions, so you can count them and refuse or end the oldest one at sign-in.
Related use cases
Try it on your own workload
HotKV speaks the Redis protocol, so you can point an existing client at it and run these same commands.