Redis users considering alternatives after licensing move

Around 70 percent of Redis users are considering alternatives after the database company made a shift away from permissive open source licensing.

According to a survey by open source database support biz Percona, the move to the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and Server Side Public License (SSPLv1) has motivated almost three quarters of the 151 developers and database managers questioned to look for alternatives.

In March, Redis — the company formerly known as Redis Labs — switched from the BSD 3-clause license, a more permissive arrangement which allows developers to make commercial use of the code without paying for the popular value-key database.

At the time, Redis said source code would continue to be freely available to developers, customers, and partners through Redis Community Edition while future Redis source-available releases would “unify core Redis with Redis Stack, including search, JSON, vector, probabilistic, and time-series data models in one free, easy-to-use package as downloadable software.”

The decision prompted the launch of Redis alternative Valkey, forked from Redis 7.2.4 and available for use and distribution under the BSD license. It is being managed by the Linux Foundation, and is backed by AWS, Google and Oracle among others.

The Percona survey, which was validated by analysts from Forrester and RedMonk, found that 63 percent of respondents were aware of the Valkey project from its inception and it was already being used by around 8 percent of them while 12 percent were using other Redis alternatives, both open source and proprietary.

Around 60 percent of the respondents said they were considering or testing Valkey. Redis remains the dominant key-value store, used by 67 percent.

In a prepared statement, Vadim Tkachenko, Percona technology fellow, said the biggest challenge to migration was understanding the risks and rewards.

“This should not just be about moving to avoid lock-in, although that is important. Instead, Valkey can deliver better results while keeping the user in control. That is the power of open source,” he said.

However, earlier this month, Redis CEO Rowan Trollope defended his company’s move away from the more permissive interpretation of open source. He said the decision was designed to prevent AWS and Google charging for Redis in their database services without paying for it. Microsoft Azure had negotiated a deal with Redis, he said.

“We anticipated they would fork because that’s exactly what Amazon did with Elasticsearch; they forked it. We think that it’s much better for us to be able to innovate freely on our code base without fear of code being taken by cloud service providers and resold as part of their offers,” he told The Register.

Earlier this week, the Linux Foundation announced the release of Valkey 8.0, with updates including multi-core utilization and asynchronous I/O threading, improved cluster scaling with automatic failover for new shards, and replicated migration states.

The foundation anticipates a 10 percent drop in memory overhead through optimized key storage in the update. ®