In the event you’re a developer who needs probably the most feature-rich, high-performance model of Redis, your alternative is obvious: Redis and never a fork. When you have time and inclination to dabble in ideological debates about open supply licensing, effectively, you would possibly make one other alternative. However for those who’re simply attempting to get your job accomplished and wish an important database that traditionally was primarily a cache however as we speak gives way more, you’re going to go for Redis and never its fork, Valkey.
So argues Redis CEO Rowan Trollope in an interview. “It’s unquestionable that Redis, since we launched Redis 8.0 with all of the capabilities from Redis Stack, is simply a much more succesful platform,” he says. He substantiates the declare by cataloging “a complete bunch of issues” that Valkey doesn’t provide, at the least not at parity: vector search, a real-time indexing and question engine, probabilistic knowledge sorts, JSON assist, and so forth. (Word that some distributors, like Google Cloud, have began to fill in a few of these blanks, at least in pre-GA releases, like Google’s Memorystore.)
That’s all CEO-speak, proper? What would a critical technologist say about Redis? It is likely to be troublesome to discover a extra credible Redis skilled than Redis founder Salvatore Sanfilippo who not too long ago returned to the Redis community (and firm) he left in 2020. Why return? Amongst different causes, Sanfilippo needs to assist form Redis for a world awash with AI. In his phrases, “not too long ago I began to assume that sorted units can encourage a brand new knowledge kind, the place the rating is definitely a vector.” Trollope says, “Redis has an actual alternative to emerge as a core a part of the genAI infrastructure stack.” Discussions about licensing, Trollope notes, is likely to be enjoyable “popcorn fodder” that fixates on the previous, however the actual focus needs to be on Redis’ future as an integral a part of the AI stack.
