Should you’re a developer who desires probably the most feature-rich, high-performance model of Redis, your alternative is evident: Redis and never a fork. When you have the time and inclination to dabble in ideological debates about open supply licensing, nicely, you may make one other alternative. However if you happen to’re simply making an attempt to get your job performed and wish an excellent database that traditionally was primarily a cache however immediately affords 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 “a complete bunch of issues” that Valkey doesn’t supply, not less than not at parity: vector search, a real-time indexing and question engine, probabilistic knowledge varieties, JSON assist, and so forth. (Be aware that some distributors, like Google Cloud, have began to fill in a few of these blanks, not less than in pre-GA releases, like Google’s Memorystore.)
That’s all CEO-speak, proper? What would a critical technologist say about Redis? It may be troublesome to discover a extra credible Redis professional than Redis founder Salvatore Sanfilippo who lately returned to the Redis group (and firm) he left in 2020. Why return? Amongst different causes, Sanfilippo desires to assist form Redis for a world awash with generative AI. In his phrases, “Not too long ago I began to suppose 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, may be enjoyable “popcorn fodder” that fixates on the previous, however the true focus needs to be on Redis’ future as an integral a part of the AI stack.
