If you’re a developer who wants the most feature-rich, high-performance version of Redis, your choice is clear: Redis and not a fork. If you have the time and inclination to dabble in ideological debates about open source licensing, well, you might make another choice. But if you’re just trying to get your job done and want a great database that historically was primarily a cache but today offers much more, you’re going to opt for Redis and not 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 claim by cataloging “a whole bunch of things” that Valkey doesn’t offer, at least not at parity: vector search, a real-time indexing and query engine, probabilistic data types, JSON support, etc. (Note that some vendors, like Google Cloud, have started to fill in some of these blanks, at least in pre-GA releases, like Google’s Memorystore.)
That’s all CEO-speak, right? What would a serious technologist say about Redis? It might be difficult to find a more credible Redis expert than Redis founder Salvatore Sanfilippo who recently returned to the Redis community (and company) he left in 2020. Why return? Among other reasons, Sanfilippo wants to help shape Redis for a world awash with generative AI. In his words, “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, might be fun “popcorn fodder” that fixates on the past, but the real focus should be on Redis’ future as an integral part of the AI stack.
