Stop Using Redis. Use Open Source Instead.

Redis, the cache system and in-memory DB we all love, started as a small passion project by an Italian developer name Salvatore Sanfilippo.

Since it was open source and free to use, a small company at the time named Redis Labs, offered it as a service, managing scaling and all infrastructure for their clients.

But Redis Labs wanted more, in 2015 they brought Salvatore in and soon thereafter changed their name to officially: “Redis.com”.

The tech world was shaken when Redis, announced its departure from open-source licensing.

This shift has left many developers questioning their reliance on what was once considered a cornerstone of internet infrastructure.

Coincidentally, or not, Salvatore left Redis around the same time (but has since joined back the company, as a “Redis evangelist”).

Redis’s license change wasn’t just a legal technicality - it represented a fundamental shift in the relationship between developers and their trusted tools.

While Redis remains an exceptional service, particularly for enterprise needs, the community’s response was swift and powerful.

The open source world’s response was swift: Redis was immediately forked.

Enter Valkey​

The fork, was named Valkey, an open-source alternative backed by tech giants like AWS, Oracle, and Google, offering not just freedom but also some performance advantages.

The practical implications are straightforward: Valkey functions as a drop-in replacement for Redis, you can literally switch up the images in most of your ongoing projects and enjoy the same protocol and basic functionality, requiring minimal changes to existing code.

Moreover, its IO threading feature claims to handle over 1 million requests per second, trippling Redis’s known performance.

AWS plays another game

AWS has sweetened the deal (or should I say, luring customers into Valkey) by offering it at a 33% lower price for serverless implementations and 20% lower for node-based deployments compared to other supported engines.

Effectively giving most users every reason they need to ditch Redis.

Are they doing it for charity? Probably not. It's not the first time AWS uses its deep pockets to sway consumers their way.

Is Redis dead?

While Valkey serves perfectly for the estimated 80% of use cases involving simple key-value in-memory storage, Redis.com still holds value for specific scenarios. If you’re running thousands of Lambda functions and need a huge connection pool, or require enterprise-grade monitoring and setup tools, Redis.com remains a compelling option. I’ve been using them professionally for the past 8 years and I can say with confidence they have an amazing (not cheap) service, that keeps getting better.

The switch to Valkey isn’t just about open-source principles - it’s about maintaining the freedom to evolve your projects without licensing constraints.
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My personal view on these changes is that companies usually get the heat when they offer a long standing “free” or open source technology and deciding one day they’re making a change for the worse.

The same happened with Docker, Elastic, Hashicorp and others. Some with great reasoning too, but they all got a huge backlash, in some cases persuading the company to back out of their announcement.
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Valkey represents the balance between reliable tech giants support and open source nature, making it extremely appealing both to small projects that may want to monetize their service in the future, as well as commerical organizations running large production deployments.

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Thank you for reading.
Feel free to reply directly with any question or feedback.
Have a great weekend!