This sort of makes me sad. Redis has strayed from what its original goal/purpose was.
I’ve been using it since it was in beta. Simple, clear, fast.
The company I’m working for now keeps trying to add more and more functionality using Redis, that doesn’t belong in Redis, and then complains about Redis scaling issues.
I may be biased, but I think this announcement is actually a very good sign for Redis, since it shows that the focus is back to the community edition, that is, the source tree you can just download from GitHub (and I believe this is an effect of the license change: it is possible for the company to work on the public tree without competitors to cut&paste the code in SAAS services).
There are few things that are interesting for me about this discussion related to complexity and use cases outside the scope.
1. You can still download Redis and type "make" and it builds without dependencies whatsoever like in the past, and that's it.
2. Then you run it and use just the subset of Redis that you like. The additional features are not imposed to the user, nor they impact the rest of the user experience. This is, actually, a lot like how it used to be when I handled the project: I added Pub/Sub, Lua scripting, geo indexing, streams, all stuff that, at first, people felt like they were out of scope, and yet many shown to be among the best features. Now it is perfectly clear that Pub/Sub belonged to Redis very well, for instance.
3. This release has improvements to the foundations, in terms of latency, for example. This means that even if you just use your small subset, you can benefit from the continued developments. Sometimes systems take the bad path of becoming less efficient over time.
So I understand the sentiment but I still see Redis remaining quite lean, at least for the version 8 that I just downloaded and I am inspecting right now.
What do you think doesn't belong in Redis? I've always viewed Redis as basically "generic datastructures in a database" — as opposed to say, Memcached, which is a very simple in-memory-only key/value store (that has always been much faster than Redis). It's hard for me to point to specific features and say: that doesn't belong in Redis! Because Redis has generally felt (to me) like a grab bag of data structures + algorithms, that are meant to be fairly low-latency but not maximally so, where your dataset has to fit in RAM (but is regularly flushed to disk so you avoid cold start issues).
Generic data structures in memory, grab bag of structures and algorithms... sounds more like a programming language or library than an external tool. C++ STL for example would fit these descriptions perfectly.
Doing everything is a recipe for bloat. In a database, in a distributed cache, in a programming language, in anything.
This is what I see everywhere. Something is a success and then everybody starts using it wrong. Like Elastic search as database, people use it for searching and then start using it as primary database. Mostly pushed by management BTW not always the software engineer.
That does not match my experience. Engineers learn a new tool, that tool is successful in solving a problem. Whether it is recency bias, incorrect pattern matching, or simply laziness, the tool is used again but with reduced success. Repeat that process a few more times (sometimes in different organizations) and now the tool is way outside the domain, ill-fit to the task at hand, and a huge pain.
That often happens with engineers who pushed that tool getting promoted a few times and building their career on said tool, which is where I have seen this being pushed down, but I think it is important that in most cases are still engineers
I worked somewhere where a team, that can only be described as a clown team, decided to use Elastic as the “database” for the entire login/auth microservice, that other teams depended on.
> The company I’m working for now keeps trying to add more and more functionality using Redis, that doesn’t belong in Redis, and then complains about Redis scaling issues.
This doesn't sound like a Redis issue, you're just not using the right tool for the job.
Totally agree. It's definitely not the right tool for what they're doing, but some of the engineers don't seem to know better, or understand, the point of being able to run scripts on Redis.
Lots of Lua scripting and calculations being done on Redis that has nothing to do with the data that's local to Redis. It's infuriating.
This was available for a long time as an extension as part of Redis Stack, but most hosted Redis providers don't make extensions available (I'm assuming due to nuances in Redis's not-quite-open licensing).
If cloud providers which include Redis are now going to include this, it opens up a lot of potential for my use case.
When do you want to store your time series data in Redis and not a database like TimescaleDB or Clickhouse which is optimized for storage on disk and analytics queries?
We used Redis in a project where we also manage hosting on a semi-public cloud infrastructure and I had troubled figuring out if license change applied to our situation. We didn't want to pay a lawyer to figure this out, so we switched to Valkey.
No, like yes they pissed a lot of people off and some people did migrate. But a large majority of "enterprise" customers didn't, it's just too much effort for a service you are paying for anyway.
I dunno, MongoDB is as if it's gone, due to a license change in 2018. So asking if redis should be thought of the same as MongoDB is a legitimate question.
Readit News
I’ve been using it since it was in beta. Simple, clear, fast.
The company I’m working for now keeps trying to add more and more functionality using Redis, that doesn’t belong in Redis, and then complains about Redis scaling issues.
There are few things that are interesting for me about this discussion related to complexity and use cases outside the scope.
1. You can still download Redis and type "make" and it builds without dependencies whatsoever like in the past, and that's it.
2. Then you run it and use just the subset of Redis that you like. The additional features are not imposed to the user, nor they impact the rest of the user experience. This is, actually, a lot like how it used to be when I handled the project: I added Pub/Sub, Lua scripting, geo indexing, streams, all stuff that, at first, people felt like they were out of scope, and yet many shown to be among the best features. Now it is perfectly clear that Pub/Sub belonged to Redis very well, for instance.
3. This release has improvements to the foundations, in terms of latency, for example. This means that even if you just use your small subset, you can benefit from the continued developments. Sometimes systems take the bad path of becoming less efficient over time.
So I understand the sentiment but I still see Redis remaining quite lean, at least for the version 8 that I just downloaded and I am inspecting right now.
Of course if what you need is a traditional DB then go with a traditional DB
But it offers those data structures and other stuff that fewer competitors have (or has it in a more quirky way)
Do you have some reliable recent benchmarks comparing the two?
Doing everything is a recipe for bloat. In a database, in a distributed cache, in a programming language, in anything.
That often happens with engineers who pushed that tool getting promoted a few times and building their career on said tool, which is where I have seen this being pushed down, but I think it is important that in most cases are still engineers
It was so slow and terrible.
This doesn't sound like a Redis issue, you're just not using the right tool for the job.
Lots of Lua scripting and calculations being done on Redis that has nothing to do with the data that's local to Redis. It's infuriating.
This was available for a long time as an extension as part of Redis Stack, but most hosted Redis providers don't make extensions available (I'm assuming due to nuances in Redis's not-quite-open licensing).
If cloud providers which include Redis are now going to include this, it opens up a lot of potential for my use case.
I just gave valkey-container its 100th star https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey-container
plus aws elasticache give you like 30% price cut when you switch to valkey powered engine ; which make it a pretty good incentive.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/announcing-...https://upcloud.com/blog/now-supporting-valkeyhttps://aiven.io/blog/introducing-aiven-for-valkeyhttps://www.instaclustr.com/blog/valkey-now-available/https://elest.io/open-source/valkey
Finally. Hope they implement this soon at Valkey.
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