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TBH I think 99% of users don't care who owns the project as long as they get their free KV store to stick data into. From a business perspective Redis falls in
by WJW 1y ago
TBH I think 99% of users don't care who owns the project as long as they get their free KV store to stick data into.
From a business perspective Redis falls into this really awkward niche where its does like 50 different things but most people only use 5% of that and have no desire to use the fancy stuff like Sentinel and Streams. What's worse: when any software tool wants to start charging money for their product, the options for users are not just "stop using Redis" or "start paying". There are also the options "switch to a competitor", "rewrite it yourself with just the functionality you need" and (for OSS projects) "fork the last open source version then maintain it yourself so you don't have to pay the overhead of the OSS company". It seems to me Redis sits in a super awkward spot where forking or rolling your own is preferable to many business users. Much more so than (say) postgres, because the cheap-and-dirty version of redis is "just" a hashmap with a network interface.
- dgfitz 1y agoIt reminds me of MOOS, for the core functionality.
- tyre 1y agoFor which users is it worth forking, adding features, and maintaining it is preferable? That sounds like a high amount of effort for something that is probably non-core for that business’s users (i.e. the company is not an infra/platform company). Paying money can easily be worth the time and distraction of maintenance. Similar to AWS. Many companies _could_ rent rackspace or linode or even ec2 instances and run on top. Services built on top like ECS and RDS are so much simpler to manage. That time, money, and focus goes elsewhere: building for users.
- WJW 1y agoI mean exactly companies like AWS and Azure, who are basically in the business of renting out hardware with custom software pre-installed. Paying licensing fees for hundreds of thousands of Elasticache users might very well be more expensive than having a 3-4 people team maintaining their own Redis fork.