In case you’re a developer who needs essentially the most feature-rich, high-performance model of Redis, your alternative is obvious: Redis and never a fork. If in case you have the time and inclination to dabble in ideological debates about open supply licensing, nicely, you would possibly make one other alternative. However when you’re simply attempting to get your job accomplished and need an awesome database that traditionally was primarily a cache however at the moment presents far 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 “an entire 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 varieties, JSON help, and many others. (Notice that some distributors, like Google Cloud, have began to fill in a few of these blanks, at the least in pre-GA releases, like Google’s Memorystore.)
That’s all CEO-speak, proper? What would a severe technologist say about Redis? It could be troublesome to discover a extra credible Redis skilled than Redis founder Salvatore Sanfilippo who just lately returned to the Redis group (and firm) he left in 2020. Why return? Amongst different causes, Sanfilippo needs to assist form Redis for a world awash with generative AI. In his phrases, “Just lately I began to assume that sorted units can encourage a brand new knowledge sort, 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, could be enjoyable “popcorn fodder” that fixates on the previous, however the actual focus ought to be on Redis’ future as an integral a part of the AI stack.