43 ms·

Redis Labs Raises a $60M Series E Round

188 points by moritzplassnig 8y ago

Max_Horstmann 8y ago
Would it still be fair to say that Redis typically is used for things like caching, messaging etc (and it's amazing for that), but not as a primary data store? Or did I miss something?
mushufasa 8y ago
How many letters can you do? F, G, H?
- antirez 8y ago
  The idea is to follow plain ASCII given that Redis handles strings as binary blobs. So after round Z we are going to do round [, followed by \ and ].
  - hidiegomariani 8y ago
    Loool
  - wolfpwner 8y ago
    So Series A is already the 65th round, right?
    - mattigames 8y ago
      27th, blank-or-control characters don't make good labels, plus their phonetic version may confuse investors, e.g. "Series Escape" (033) just sounds bad
  - alexpetralia 8y ago
    Series ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - reitzensteinm 8y ago
      Well in UTF-8 encoding that is C2AF5C5F28E38384295F2FC2AF, or 1.542e+31 rounds of funding. If they're not profitable by then, it might be time to do an acquihire or pivot to hosted memcachedb.
      - adtac 8y ago
        >1.542e+31 rounds of funding This is the funniest thing I've read all day lol. Almost reads like something straight out of HBO's Silicon Valley.
- jdp23 8y ago
  There was a software tools company in the 1990s that got up to Series AA. I remember thinking "please don't let this ever happen to my startup".
  - redisman 8y ago
    Wow AA round? I'm guessing the founders had no equity left after the first 10 and were just throwing money into a pit.
redm 8y ago
I wonder if this raise is to continue scaling the existing product customers/add runway or to expand its's scope to something new.
- virtuexru 8y ago
  From the article: "the company plans to use the new funding to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and continue to invest in the Redis community and product development."
- antirez 8y ago
  Well from the POV of the open source Redis, also before this round, but even more now, Redis Labs is going to continue to sponsor me, Fabio Nicotra, and other folks around the OSS part doing community/patches/... I think that part of the round will also serve to put more efforts in the Redis extensions provided as modules. Incidentally I need to extend the modules system a lot more, especially with "hooks" so that modules can capture any command execution, because yesterday I wanted to implement the Gopher protocol as a module and I could not do that easily without spawning a thread to listen to some other socket, and remained hardly disappointed.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    I hoped you'd be beyond the need to be sponsored by now!
    - antirez 8y ago
      You optimist...
- trjordan 8y ago
  Yes, always, both. There's almost certainly a non-trivial sales team spend here. Redis Enterprise isn't a decision that organizations take lightly, and databases aren't cheap. Mongo is public on a similar model, so there's almost certainly enough room to grow with their current offerings (licenses and hosting). Based on 238 employees, they're probably at $25m+ in revenue. Many companies start to think about a "second act" at this point, but few of them actually pull it off. So we'll probably continue to see improvement around the core product and a slew of new integrations, but I'd be surprised if they came up with a totally standalone new product that's worth $X0,000,000 / year in short order. There's too much to do with Redis itself and the hosting platform to devote so much effort to a brand new effort.
5trokerac3 8y ago
People pay for Redis? /s
- aries185 8y ago
  Yes, but not Redis open source, which has been and always will be Free Open Source Software http://antirez.com/news/120 http://antirez.com/news/120. The 'Redis' that people pay for is Redis Enterprise, or any of the cloud versions of Redis such as Redis Cloud.
misiti3780 8y ago
what do they offer that the amazon version does not ?
- antirez 8y ago
  The things I like more as an "external" person given that I handle the OSS part and I'm not directly involved in the internal products development, if not as a technical advisor, are: 1. Transparent clustering. You talk to that thing like if it was a single instance and it scales to the cluster. Failover and so forth happen automatically. It'a a lot higher level than Redis Cluster (which also they support as a protocol), there are good and bad things in the different designs, but I like how well it works. 2. CRDTs store for multi master, also across far geographical area. 3. Redis on flash, using different persistent memory types. This feature originated from an early experiment I did years ago, called "diskstore", then Redis Labs worked at it many years and reached a quite cool thing. 4. All the above can be installed in your servers if you want very high memory setups that is impossible to pay for on the cloud. 5. The various modules like RedisGraph, RedisSearch and so forth are only available in the Redis Labs cloud (or you can install manually on your server). Some of those modules like RedisGraph is receiving years of development. 6. I know that the support team and everybody at Redis Labs really knows Redis. Which was one of the main reasons eventually I joined the company. So I think they are able to handle core-level issues for every user having troubles. A lot of Redis operational improvements came from Redis Labs core/support team after investigating issues with customers. AFAIK those are the stuff I like more from the external but honestly they do a number of things I don't know very well for certain big customers.
- Thaxll 8y ago
  Amazon actually doesn't run the same Redis as the rest of us, I wouldn't be surprised if they re-wrote a lot of parts of it. They probably re-wrote the storage engine ect ...
  - louthy 8y ago
    > wouldn't be surprised > probably Hmm, anything of substance, or is this just pure speculation?
miguelmota 8y ago
From the license page: https://redislabs.com/community/licenses/ https://redislabs.com/community/licenses/ > Is Commons Clause open source? > According to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), open source licensing cannot limit the scope of a license – it only applies conditions to exercising it. With this model, no one can stop you from doing whatever you want with the software, whether commercial or non-commercial, or (famously) good or evil. Therefore, the no-sale restriction imposed by Commons Clause means that any software under this new license is non-open source by definition. However, in practice, Commons Clause only adds a limitation concerning fair use, and we believe that both licensing approaches share the same core value of making software available for use by anyone. That's a long way of saying the new license is not OSI-compliant. The new license is BSD with a common clause which according to the president of OSI, this clause instantly renders it non-approved. https://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-licensing-war-commons-clause/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-licensing-war-comm...
symisc_devel 8y ago
> Redis Labs CEO Ofer Bengal told me the company’s isn’t cash positive yet. He also noted that the company didn’t need to raise this round but that he decided to do so in order to accelerate growth. “In this competitive environment, you have to spend a lot and push hard on product development,” he said. I'm always amazed how startups like this where R&D practically cost nothing are not profitable yet after years in the market and thousands of customers. C'mon guys 99% of the work is already done by antirez and the open source community.
- Scarbutt 8y ago
  * C'mon guys 99% of the work is already done by antirez* Yes, but maybe he's not a business man or is not in his interest to pursue the road of something like redis labs.
  - carlosdp 8y ago
    That wasn't really the original commenter's point though...
- antirez 8y ago
  Basically what happens is that even if you start to be cash positive, you want to get a bigger company, so you need to scale a lot the sales team and the customer support team, so you spend more money in order to end with more customers, not caring about the short term profitability. This is common to most startups basically. Btw the Redis Labs development team at this point is quite large, because Redis open source is the core, but the company produces a number of things in order to provide a good managed Redis experience, all the additional features and modules, and so forth. But even so, I think it is accurate to say that most money in most companies of this kind will go to orchestrate the company at a different level, not just R&D.
  - ljm 8y ago
    > even if you start to be cash positive, you want to get a bigger company I am really interested to hear how you would square this against, say, Bssecamp's modus operandi. How would you define 'enough'?
ris 8y ago
Hmmm. The more money companies raise, the less honesty we tend to see from them.
rsweeney21 8y ago
Speaking to a room full of CEOs at a summit, the CEO of Chegg once said "If you are raising a series F, it means what you think it means."
- dpflan 8y ago
  :) Is there a break down somewhere of what each series should signify?
  - dpflan 8y ago
    Starting a list: > https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/102015/series-b-c-funding-what-it-all-means-and-how-it-works.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/10201... > https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/understanding-startup-valuation-a393f6fadc6f https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/understanding-startup-...
- lquist 8y ago
  This. The only exception being if the round is measured in billions. Cf Uber, etc.
- btian 8y ago
  What does it mean? Tesla raised Series F in 2009, and it's still alive.
  - adventured 8y ago
    Workday also raised a series F. They're presently worth $42 billion with $2.1b in sales, 172% sales growth over three years, and are likely set to be another enterprise software juggernaut. It clearly doesn't inherently mean anything. What matters is whether the business is growing properly versus the capital being consumed. If more capital will reasonably accelerate growth further, feed the business more capital (depending on what the owners want to pursue of course).
    - Aeolun 8y ago
mychael 8y ago
As a customer, this is unfortunate news. Why is it so hard to just supply an honest service in exchange for money and take a nice profit?
- mavdi 8y ago
  You’re getting downvoted but I too hate the world domination plans of every single successful start up.
  - redisman 8y ago
    Reminds me of being promoted until you fail. Growing and creeping until you fail to deliver the core service you were the best at. HN skews hard to the unicorn-or-bust mentality for some reason.
    - halfjoking 8y ago
      Probably because YC owns HN and they only make money if more people drink the VC Kool-Aid?
- ajmurmann 8y ago
  It is so hard to do this because of VC money. Once you have taken the VC money success is not an option anymore. You must be super successful and ideally wipe out all competitors! If I'd start my own startup and don't take VC money and the company makes $300k-$500k profit per year, I'd be ecstatic and happy to stay at that level forever. Maybe I'd focus more on reducing my own time spent at some point, rather than growing more. For a VC that's the same as failing. They invest in a wide range of companies and they need to get some major cash out from the successful companies. There also needs to be an exit. That means IPO or sell the thing. The exit is needed because the fund has a set lifetime. After that the shares go to the fund investors. For years you had A16Z representing, now you got a bunch folks you never heard of. Neither you nor those people want to deal with any of that. If you have an IPO the treadmill continues, because our economy is about exponential growth and not sustainable, steady income. That pattern is even reinforced by our tax code. Capital gains < income tax. I can defer capital gains by not selling. Don't give my dividends! Those get taxed immediately!
ww520 8y ago
I really hope they succeed. Redis has real solid tech that has helped tens of thousands (millions?) websites scaled.
the_common_man 8y ago
Does anyone know how much redis enterprise costs?
- jillesvangurp 8y ago
  Price transparency is not optional for SAAS products. Seems to be a well kept secret on their website. Instant turn off for me. It means there are hidden costs, special deals at the discretion of some sales person, and other sales BS you have to deal with. I see this as an anti pattern for a SAAS service. We pay for lots of SAAS stuff at the company I run; we don't talk to sales people for any of that stuff ever. We engage with their support when stuff is broken. But not sales. Redis is a great product but I fail to see the valuation that comes with a 60M investment (a billion+?). Yes, the cloud offered variety could potentially be interesting but competing products are available and this seems to be a commodity product running on commodity hardware. AWS already offers it so do others, I believe.
etaioinshrdlu 8y ago
Redis Cloud is the very definition of a great cloud service. Cheap, easy, reliable, scalable up and down with no downtime. Can be placed in your same AWS region.
coleifer 8y ago
I love Redis, but I'm a bit skeptical of some of the changes that are currently in development. The respv3 protocol has some features that, while they sound neat, also could significantly complicate client library code. There's also a lot of work going into a granular acl. I can't imagine why this would be necessary, or a higher priority than other changes like multi-thread support, better persistence model, data-types, etc.
- pupdogg 8y ago
  The good thing is that you have a direct line of communication with the developer himself, @antirez on this portal or GitHub. From what I know, @antirez calls the shots on what gets implemented in Redis core...NOT Redis Labs. After reading several technical/non-technical posts at http://antirez.com http://antirez.com, I can confidently say that his decisions are always sound and justifiable! We love you @antirez!
  - antirez 8y ago
    So nice words, thanks! I'll go ahead after this encouragement to try to reply to the OP about why I'm doing certain things.
- antirez 8y ago
  Thanks coleifer, I understand that the current development path may look odd, but it's definitely not the first time: the critiques for Lua scripting or Pub/Sub where much stronger AFAIK :-) However I want to really share what is the process behind and why certain features like ACLs are so important (for reasons very different than the ones you may guess I think, that is, no enterprise customers in need for security), and why RESP3 has out-of-band data channels support (even if they are not implemented by the server). I'll write a blog post today, and reply here with the address. Cheers! P.S. I'll also address threading and persistence.
  - coleifer 8y ago
    Thank you for taking the time to respond so thoughtfully to my comment. If I had been talking directly to you, I hope I would have written something less entitled and expressed more gratitude for the gifts you've given the community, and which you continue to improve. Redis is exactly the kind of software that gives me joy. Aesthetically and intellectually. Its pieces are orthogonal -- a word you used in your blog post. The code is small, tight, and well designed. It invites you to think more creatively. The lolwut command was also a very good innovation!
sandGorgon 8y ago
This looks like direct competition to Kafka. The technology behind Kafka Streams is solid and can probably give Kafka a run for their money (in fact Redis has more adoption than Kafka). However their product is not in the same quality range. Hopefully this should fix it.
- tbrock 8y ago
  Surely you jest. Redis is less stable than kafka? I must have missed something.
  - sandGorgon 8y ago
    I didn't say it was less stable - I said that the product has less features. And I mean product in the larger sense of things - management tools,etc etc. Similar to the Confluent Platform - for the streaming usecase.
oarabbus_ 8y ago
A wise man once said "you don't want to raise a series D and certainly nothing after that"
ralusek 8y ago
What is the longterm path for things like Redis Labs, Mongo, and Elastic, etc? They all seem to have an open source database which they in turn monetize by offering as a DBaaS. But can they really bet against AWS in the long run? Elastic's own cloud ElasticSearch is better than AWS's notoriously bad implementation, but what if it wasn't? Elastic's cloud offering runs on AWS and other third party offerings, so all it would take would be AWS reaching relative parity in quality, and they would then surely have the upper-hand by being the cloud infrastructure their own offering is run off of. I feel like the same is true with AWS Elasticache vs Redis Labs. What if AWS reaches parity, but can additionally offer the ease of not managing 2 accounts, as well as the ease of co-locating the cache with the app server and putting it all in a VPC. What is the endgame for these DBaaS when they have AWS copying their work?
- davman 8y ago
  The longterm path is to relicense with https://commonsclause.com/ https://commonsclause.com/ and prevent AWS from selling the software as a platform.
hannob 8y ago
Again this bullshit: “When we came out with this new license, there were many different views,” he acknowledged. “Some people condemned that. But after the initial noise calmed down — and especially after some other companies came out with a similar concept — the community now understands that the original concept of open source has to be fixed because it isn’t suitable anymore to the modern era where cloud companies use their monopoly power to adopt any successful open source project without contributing anything to it.” Okay, so here's the thing, at FOSDEM this year there were multiple events around this issue, and I haven't seen a single person defend the stance of Redis and others. Also the original concept of open source is doing fine, thanks. The problem is a couple of overvalued, VC-backed companies that found out they don't have a business model that is compatible with the promises they made to their investor.
- avip 8y ago
  This is weird. I just came back from a gun rights rally in AZ, and haven't seen a single person defend the stance for gun control.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    I’m not sure there’s people in the world that benefit from Redis’s stance other than Redis.
    - hobofan 8y ago
      If that means that RedisLabs stays in business and Redis stays maintained (which is not otherwise guaranteed), it means that the general public still benefits from it.
      - merb 8y ago
        you know that you can have redis maintained, by just by hiring antirez? So instead of raising $60M you can just pay $500k per year.
        8y ago

Would it still be fair to say that Redis typically is used for things like caching, messaging etc (and it's amazing for that), but not as a primary data store? Or did I miss something?

mushufasa 8y ago

How many letters can you do? F, G, H?

antirez 8y ago
The idea is to follow plain ASCII given that Redis handles strings as binary blobs. So after round Z we are going to do round [, followed by \ and ].
- hidiegomariani 8y ago
  Loool
- wolfpwner 8y ago
  So Series A is already the 65th round, right?
  - mattigames 8y ago
    27th, blank-or-control characters don't make good labels, plus their phonetic version may confuse investors, e.g. "Series Escape" (033) just sounds bad
- alexpetralia 8y ago
  Series ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - reitzensteinm 8y ago
    Well in UTF-8 encoding that is C2AF5C5F28E38384295F2FC2AF, or 1.542e+31 rounds of funding. If they're not profitable by then, it might be time to do an acquihire or pivot to hosted memcachedb.
    - adtac 8y ago
      >1.542e+31 rounds of funding This is the funniest thing I've read all day lol. Almost reads like something straight out of HBO's Silicon Valley.
jdp23 8y ago
There was a software tools company in the 1990s that got up to Series AA. I remember thinking "please don't let this ever happen to my startup".
- redisman 8y ago
  Wow AA round? I'm guessing the founders had no equity left after the first 10 and were just throwing money into a pit.

redm 8y ago

I wonder if this raise is to continue scaling the existing product customers/add runway or to expand its's scope to something new.

virtuexru 8y ago
From the article: "the company plans to use the new funding to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and continue to invest in the Redis community and product development."
antirez 8y ago
Well from the POV of the open source Redis, also before this round, but even more now, Redis Labs is going to continue to sponsor me, Fabio Nicotra, and other folks around the OSS part doing community/patches/... I think that part of the round will also serve to put more efforts in the Redis extensions provided as modules. Incidentally I need to extend the modules system a lot more, especially with "hooks" so that modules can capture any command execution, because yesterday I wanted to implement the Gopher protocol as a module and I could not do that easily without spawning a thread to listen to some other socket, and remained hardly disappointed.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jacquesm 8y ago
  I hoped you'd be beyond the need to be sponsored by now!
  - antirez 8y ago
    You optimist...
trjordan 8y ago
Yes, always, both. There's almost certainly a non-trivial sales team spend here. Redis Enterprise isn't a decision that organizations take lightly, and databases aren't cheap. Mongo is public on a similar model, so there's almost certainly enough room to grow with their current offerings (licenses and hosting). Based on 238 employees, they're probably at $25m+ in revenue. Many companies start to think about a "second act" at this point, but few of them actually pull it off. So we'll probably continue to see improvement around the core product and a slew of new integrations, but I'd be surprised if they came up with a totally standalone new product that's worth $X0,000,000 / year in short order. There's too much to do with Redis itself and the hosting platform to devote so much effort to a brand new effort.

5trokerac3 8y ago

People pay for Redis? /s

aries185 8y ago
Yes, but not Redis open source, which has been and always will be Free Open Source Software http://antirez.com/news/120 http://antirez.com/news/120. The 'Redis' that people pay for is Redis Enterprise, or any of the cloud versions of Redis such as Redis Cloud.

misiti3780 8y ago

what do they offer that the amazon version does not ?

antirez 8y ago
The things I like more as an "external" person given that I handle the OSS part and I'm not directly involved in the internal products development, if not as a technical advisor, are: 1. Transparent clustering. You talk to that thing like if it was a single instance and it scales to the cluster. Failover and so forth happen automatically. It'a a lot higher level than Redis Cluster (which also they support as a protocol), there are good and bad things in the different designs, but I like how well it works. 2. CRDTs store for multi master, also across far geographical area. 3. Redis on flash, using different persistent memory types. This feature originated from an early experiment I did years ago, called "diskstore", then Redis Labs worked at it many years and reached a quite cool thing. 4. All the above can be installed in your servers if you want very high memory setups that is impossible to pay for on the cloud. 5. The various modules like RedisGraph, RedisSearch and so forth are only available in the Redis Labs cloud (or you can install manually on your server). Some of those modules like RedisGraph is receiving years of development. 6. I know that the support team and everybody at Redis Labs really knows Redis. Which was one of the main reasons eventually I joined the company. So I think they are able to handle core-level issues for every user having troubles. A lot of Redis operational improvements came from Redis Labs core/support team after investigating issues with customers. AFAIK those are the stuff I like more from the external but honestly they do a number of things I don't know very well for certain big customers.
Thaxll 8y ago
Amazon actually doesn't run the same Redis as the rest of us, I wouldn't be surprised if they re-wrote a lot of parts of it. They probably re-wrote the storage engine ect ...
- louthy 8y ago
  > wouldn't be surprised > probably Hmm, anything of substance, or is this just pure speculation?

miguelmota 8y ago

From the license page: https://redislabs.com/community/licenses/ https://redislabs.com/community/licenses/ > Is Commons Clause open source? > According to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), open source licensing cannot limit the scope of a license – it only applies conditions to exercising it. With this model, no one can stop you from doing whatever you want with the software, whether commercial or non-commercial, or (famously) good or evil. Therefore, the no-sale restriction imposed by Commons Clause means that any software under this new license is non-open source by definition. However, in practice, Commons Clause only adds a limitation concerning fair use, and we believe that both licensing approaches share the same core value of making software available for use by anyone. That's a long way of saying the new license is not OSI-compliant. The new license is BSD with a common clause which according to the president of OSI, this clause instantly renders it non-approved. https://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-licensing-war-commons-clause/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-licensing-war-comm...

symisc_devel 8y ago

> Redis Labs CEO Ofer Bengal told me the company’s isn’t cash positive yet. He also noted that the company didn’t need to raise this round but that he decided to do so in order to accelerate growth. “In this competitive environment, you have to spend a lot and push hard on product development,” he said. I'm always amazed how startups like this where R&D practically cost nothing are not profitable yet after years in the market and thousands of customers. C'mon guys 99% of the work is already done by antirez and the open source community.

Scarbutt 8y ago
* C'mon guys 99% of the work is already done by antirez* Yes, but maybe he's not a business man or is not in his interest to pursue the road of something like redis labs.
- carlosdp 8y ago
  That wasn't really the original commenter's point though...
antirez 8y ago
Basically what happens is that even if you start to be cash positive, you want to get a bigger company, so you need to scale a lot the sales team and the customer support team, so you spend more money in order to end with more customers, not caring about the short term profitability. This is common to most startups basically. Btw the Redis Labs development team at this point is quite large, because Redis open source is the core, but the company produces a number of things in order to provide a good managed Redis experience, all the additional features and modules, and so forth. But even so, I think it is accurate to say that most money in most companies of this kind will go to orchestrate the company at a different level, not just R&D.
- ljm 8y ago
  > even if you start to be cash positive, you want to get a bigger company I am really interested to hear how you would square this against, say, Bssecamp's modus operandi. How would you define 'enough'?

ris 8y ago

Hmmm. The more money companies raise, the less honesty we tend to see from them.

rsweeney21 8y ago

Speaking to a room full of CEOs at a summit, the CEO of Chegg once said "If you are raising a series F, it means what you think it means."

dpflan 8y ago
:) Is there a break down somewhere of what each series should signify?
- dpflan 8y ago
  Starting a list: > https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/102015/series-b-c-funding-what-it-all-means-and-how-it-works.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/10201... > https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/understanding-startup-valuation-a393f6fadc6f https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/understanding-startup-...
lquist 8y ago
This. The only exception being if the round is measured in billions. Cf Uber, etc.
btian 8y ago
What does it mean? Tesla raised Series F in 2009, and it's still alive.
- adventured 8y ago
  Workday also raised a series F. They're presently worth $42 billion with $2.1b in sales, 172% sales growth over three years, and are likely set to be another enterprise software juggernaut. It clearly doesn't inherently mean anything. What matters is whether the business is growing properly versus the capital being consumed. If more capital will reasonably accelerate growth further, feed the business more capital (depending on what the owners want to pursue of course).
  - Aeolun 8y ago

mychael 8y ago

As a customer, this is unfortunate news. Why is it so hard to just supply an honest service in exchange for money and take a nice profit?

mavdi 8y ago
You’re getting downvoted but I too hate the world domination plans of every single successful start up.
- redisman 8y ago
  Reminds me of being promoted until you fail. Growing and creeping until you fail to deliver the core service you were the best at. HN skews hard to the unicorn-or-bust mentality for some reason.
  - halfjoking 8y ago
    Probably because YC owns HN and they only make money if more people drink the VC Kool-Aid?
ajmurmann 8y ago
It is so hard to do this because of VC money. Once you have taken the VC money success is not an option anymore. You must be super successful and ideally wipe out all competitors! If I'd start my own startup and don't take VC money and the company makes $300k-$500k profit per year, I'd be ecstatic and happy to stay at that level forever. Maybe I'd focus more on reducing my own time spent at some point, rather than growing more. For a VC that's the same as failing. They invest in a wide range of companies and they need to get some major cash out from the successful companies. There also needs to be an exit. That means IPO or sell the thing. The exit is needed because the fund has a set lifetime. After that the shares go to the fund investors. For years you had A16Z representing, now you got a bunch folks you never heard of. Neither you nor those people want to deal with any of that. If you have an IPO the treadmill continues, because our economy is about exponential growth and not sustainable, steady income. That pattern is even reinforced by our tax code. Capital gains < income tax. I can defer capital gains by not selling. Don't give my dividends! Those get taxed immediately!

ww520 8y ago

I really hope they succeed. Redis has real solid tech that has helped tens of thousands (millions?) websites scaled.

the_common_man 8y ago

Does anyone know how much redis enterprise costs?

jillesvangurp 8y ago
Price transparency is not optional for SAAS products. Seems to be a well kept secret on their website. Instant turn off for me. It means there are hidden costs, special deals at the discretion of some sales person, and other sales BS you have to deal with. I see this as an anti pattern for a SAAS service. We pay for lots of SAAS stuff at the company I run; we don't talk to sales people for any of that stuff ever. We engage with their support when stuff is broken. But not sales. Redis is a great product but I fail to see the valuation that comes with a 60M investment (a billion+?). Yes, the cloud offered variety could potentially be interesting but competing products are available and this seems to be a commodity product running on commodity hardware. AWS already offers it so do others, I believe.

etaioinshrdlu 8y ago

Redis Cloud is the very definition of a great cloud service. Cheap, easy, reliable, scalable up and down with no downtime. Can be placed in your same AWS region.

coleifer 8y ago

I love Redis, but I'm a bit skeptical of some of the changes that are currently in development. The respv3 protocol has some features that, while they sound neat, also could significantly complicate client library code. There's also a lot of work going into a granular acl. I can't imagine why this would be necessary, or a higher priority than other changes like multi-thread support, better persistence model, data-types, etc.

pupdogg 8y ago
The good thing is that you have a direct line of communication with the developer himself, @antirez on this portal or GitHub. From what I know, @antirez calls the shots on what gets implemented in Redis core...NOT Redis Labs. After reading several technical/non-technical posts at http://antirez.com http://antirez.com, I can confidently say that his decisions are always sound and justifiable! We love you @antirez!
- antirez 8y ago
  So nice words, thanks! I'll go ahead after this encouragement to try to reply to the OP about why I'm doing certain things.
antirez 8y ago
Thanks coleifer, I understand that the current development path may look odd, but it's definitely not the first time: the critiques for Lua scripting or Pub/Sub where much stronger AFAIK :-) However I want to really share what is the process behind and why certain features like ACLs are so important (for reasons very different than the ones you may guess I think, that is, no enterprise customers in need for security), and why RESP3 has out-of-band data channels support (even if they are not implemented by the server). I'll write a blog post today, and reply here with the address. Cheers! P.S. I'll also address threading and persistence.
- coleifer 8y ago
  Thank you for taking the time to respond so thoughtfully to my comment. If I had been talking directly to you, I hope I would have written something less entitled and expressed more gratitude for the gifts you've given the community, and which you continue to improve. Redis is exactly the kind of software that gives me joy. Aesthetically and intellectually. Its pieces are orthogonal -- a word you used in your blog post. The code is small, tight, and well designed. It invites you to think more creatively. The lolwut command was also a very good innovation!

sandGorgon 8y ago

This looks like direct competition to Kafka. The technology behind Kafka Streams is solid and can probably give Kafka a run for their money (in fact Redis has more adoption than Kafka). However their product is not in the same quality range. Hopefully this should fix it.

tbrock 8y ago
Surely you jest. Redis is less stable than kafka? I must have missed something.
- sandGorgon 8y ago
  I didn't say it was less stable - I said that the product has less features. And I mean product in the larger sense of things - management tools,etc etc. Similar to the Confluent Platform - for the streaming usecase.

oarabbus_ 8y ago

A wise man once said "you don't want to raise a series D and certainly nothing after that"

ralusek 8y ago

What is the longterm path for things like Redis Labs, Mongo, and Elastic, etc? They all seem to have an open source database which they in turn monetize by offering as a DBaaS. But can they really bet against AWS in the long run? Elastic's own cloud ElasticSearch is better than AWS's notoriously bad implementation, but what if it wasn't? Elastic's cloud offering runs on AWS and other third party offerings, so all it would take would be AWS reaching relative parity in quality, and they would then surely have the upper-hand by being the cloud infrastructure their own offering is run off of. I feel like the same is true with AWS Elasticache vs Redis Labs. What if AWS reaches parity, but can additionally offer the ease of not managing 2 accounts, as well as the ease of co-locating the cache with the app server and putting it all in a VPC. What is the endgame for these DBaaS when they have AWS copying their work?

davman 8y ago
The longterm path is to relicense with https://commonsclause.com/ https://commonsclause.com/ and prevent AWS from selling the software as a platform.

hannob 8y ago

Again this bullshit: “When we came out with this new license, there were many different views,” he acknowledged. “Some people condemned that. But after the initial noise calmed down — and especially after some other companies came out with a similar concept — the community now understands that the original concept of open source has to be fixed because it isn’t suitable anymore to the modern era where cloud companies use their monopoly power to adopt any successful open source project without contributing anything to it.” Okay, so here's the thing, at FOSDEM this year there were multiple events around this issue, and I haven't seen a single person defend the stance of Redis and others. Also the original concept of open source is doing fine, thanks. The problem is a couple of overvalued, VC-backed companies that found out they don't have a business model that is compatible with the promises they made to their investor.

avip 8y ago
This is weird. I just came back from a gun rights rally in AZ, and haven't seen a single person defend the stance for gun control.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  I’m not sure there’s people in the world that benefit from Redis’s stance other than Redis.
  - hobofan 8y ago
    If that means that RedisLabs stays in business and Redis stays maintained (which is not otherwise guaranteed), it means that the general public still benefits from it.
    - merb 8y ago
      you know that you can have redis maintained, by just by hiring antirez? So instead of raising $60M you can just pay $500k per year.
      - 8y ago