If you’re a developer who needs essentially the most feature-rich, high-performance model of Redis, your selection is evident: Redis and never a fork. If you could have the time and inclination to dabble in ideological debates about open supply licensing, effectively, you would possibly make one other selection. But for those who’re simply attempting to get your job executed and wish an important database that traditionally was primarily a cache however right now gives rather more, you’re going to go for Redis and never its fork, Valkey.
So argues Redis CEO Rowan Trollope in an interview. “It is unquestionable that Redis, since we launched Redis 8.0 with all the capabilities from Redis Stack, is just a far more capable platform,” he says. He substantiates the declare by cataloging “a whole bunch of things” that Valkey doesn’t supply, at the very least not at parity: vector search, a real-time indexing and question engine, probabilistic information sorts, JSON help, and so forth. (Note that some distributors, like Google Cloud, have began to fill in a few of these blanks, at the very 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 professional than Redis founder Salvatore Sanfilippo who not too long ago returned to the Redis neighborhood (and firm) he left in 2020. Why return? Among different causes, Sanfilippo needs to assist form Redis for a world awash with generative AI. In his phrases, “Recently I started to think that sorted sets can inspire a new data type, where the score is actually a vector.” Trollope says, “Redis has a real opportunity to emerge as a core 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.
