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Comment by data_ders | Hacker News Reader

newb here -- why would a developer pay for Redis? i.e. "Redis Enterprise"?

Check this out:

https://redislabs.com/redis-enterprise/advantages/

> Redis Enterprise is a robust in-memory database platform built by the people who develop open source Redis. It maintains the simplicity and high performance of Redis, while adding many enterprise-grade capabilities, such as linear scaling to hundreds of millions of operations per second, Active-Active geo-replication with local latency, Redis on Flash to tier data across dynamic and persistent memory and solid-state disk (SSD) to reduce total cost of ownership, and five-nines (99.999%) uptime based on built-in durability and single-digit-seconds failover. Redis Enterprise supports many data modeling methods with modules such as RediSearch, RedisJSON, RedisGraph, RedisTimeSeries, RedisBloom, and RedisAI, and allows operations to be executed across and between modules and core Redis functionality using RedisGears, a serverless engine that runs across shards and nodes of Redis Enterprise cluster. All this while keeping database latency under one millisecond, so your application can respond instantaneously. Learn how to implement the best in-memory database: Redis Enterprise.

If an external contributor were to bring such features to the open source redis, would they refuse it?

Probably won't be able to refuse it outright. Though It's unlikely that an external contributor would be able to bring these features in easily. Redis Labs has a lot of people working on their enterprise offering.

Redis has sentinel and scaling features, as well as established patterns. Enterprises are likely willing to pay for experience of doing it right, reliably.

Not all of the value they provide can be replaced by a pull request.

That said, theres equal if not greater motivation for this hypothetical contributor to raise their own $100mm and compete with Redis Labs.

Most likely.

There are proprietary modules like full text search that you might be interested in using. Also, perhaps you want/need dedicated tech support beyond what stack overflow will give you.

It's not the developers per se that are paying. It's their employer, i.e.: large companies who want things like

- professional support

- proprietary modules for Redis

- advice on integrating Redis into their legacy systems

Yep, open-source is 'free' as in puppy. The TCO of open source software is not zero. It's just that some people are willing to absorb those external costs.

When I, as a developer, have an issue with some open source code, I spend some amount of time fixing it (labor cost), and some amount of time with a broken system (downtime). But it's not a big deal for me, if I spend 30 minutes troubleshooting a problem. Scale that up to a company with thousands of employees, and those can be big costs.

And of course, as we all know, you'll never spend any time troubleshooting proprietary solutions.

I’m not saying that proprietary software doesn’t have support costs.

I am saying that source code licenses are irrelevant to support and operations costs.

Both RedHat and Microsoft will sell you a support contract.

Active active geo-distribution, for one. If you want globally distributed consistent clusters, enterprise makes it possible through their CRDT based enterprise-only option.

Is this really common to have a geo replicated redis. My impression was the geo replication is usually done at db level not at cache.

Redis _can_ be used as a cache, but it's not the only use case.

I've personally mostly used it as a message broker (celery in python, resque in ruby), but it can definitely be used as a database.

Bottom line, it's a very flexible tool, and can be more than "just a cache".

It may not be just a cache, but please, it is not a database. A database should guarantee data consistency, integrity, and ideally availability. ACID + HA. Redis does not do these. It is fast because it doesn't worry about the niceties of concurrency models and isolation models and recovery models and agreement protocols. And you can use it as a database as a very large clothing retailer I know did as an online feature store. However, it crashed on black friday due to overload and there was a massive revenue shortage because the ML models that should have been using it to retrieve features were going bananas. It was a case of misuse by said company - it should not be used for mission critical HA persistent data infra, IMHO.

That seems like a pretty restrictive definition of the word database. To me, redis is absolutely a database, just one with a very different model than the more common databases.

How does Redis "not do data consistency"? Same question for HA? On the HA point, my understanding was that it was one of the reasons to use Redis Labs, because they handle a lot of the setup and management of the infrastructure required to provide a setup that does provide HA.

Sure but most people are using it as a cache. Their valuation reflects its use as a cache.

> I've personally mostly used it as a message broker

Did you geo replicate message broker?

> most people are using it as a cache

Maybe, I actually have no idea, have you seen numbers?

> Their valuation reflects its use as a cache

How so?

> Did you geo replicate message broker?

Definitely not common but I can think of a few cases. Global rate limiting data store for example.

The "user" and the "customer" are pretty different for these kinda things.

They are experts in running a Redis cluster, and you can leave the complexities to them.

I've often wondered the same thing.

Developers may not, enterprises might.

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