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Comment by redm | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what the key value Redis Labs is bringing that justifies so much money (other than a sales team, support, and other minor changes to Redis). In other words, what key tech are they adding? The page dedicated to the software is really generic:

https://redislabs.com/redis-enterprise-software/overview/

I started using KeyDB and the project is great. I'm more inclined to support the tech they are integrating that check things off my Redis wishlist such as Active-Active replication and true multi-core support (not just IO treads).

https://keydb.dev/

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Redis is in the same position as many other companies in the open source tools space that have also done well: Grafana Labs also comes to mind. When large enterprise and government clients want to use open source infrastructure like Redis, they invariably have a myriad of requirements that aren't obvious to anyone who doesn't work at that scale. They are willing to pay a lot of money to solve these enterprise scale problems even though the underlying engine is open source, since building the tools to do so themselves would easily cost even more.

Right, but isn't RedisLabs screwed now that AWS has packaged Redis open source into an AWS service that is cheaper?

AWS is everyone's competitor. Their playbook is to take open source products, package them up in the AWS cloud, and provide long term support. That does not mean that the AWS version of every open source product is the best version. Redis Labs doubtless has a deeper feature set that will appeal to customers in a different way than the AWS offering. Additionally, Redis Labs is cloud agnostic. That's a big differentiator.

Yeah, but it’s not cheaper than AWS or rather it can’t be profitably cheaper IMO because of lack of scale. So as long as AWS option is good enough, as a CFO I’d go in that direction.

Nebulous claims like cloud neutrality don’t pay the bills and I have not really seen businesses jump from one cloud to another seamlessly, no matter the software.

If AWS was "good enough" in all cases, no one would use redis labs solution on AWS.

https://redislabs.com/partner/aws/

as they sell it, obviously some organizations are buying it, so those orgs must find the AWS option "not good enough". is it possible that AWS will continue to improve it? yes, but presumably Redis Labs will also continue to improve their solution.

This episode discusses how such businesses avoid having the big cloud cos become competitors https://pca.st/episode/889547c9-ffe8-4332-ba7e-e4678bf22c3d

Thank you. I will listen to this one. Invest Like the Best is awesome.

Redis Labs developed all the modules (RedisSearch, RedisGraph, etc). Those are all licensed in such a way that Amazon cannot rehost them.

And anyone who says that's wrong to do is very disingenuous. That is a very legitimate business model, and IMO the only way to compete with AWS as an open source product.

> are all licensed in such a way that Amazon cannot rehost them

You mean in such a way that Amazon cannot "productize" them, right? Surely you can host them on AWS if you're setting it up yourself.

From a licensing perspective, yes. However I looked into installing custom modules in Elasticache Redis once and you cannot do it (Same with RedisLabs' hosted solution although you can at least install their modules).

If you installed Redis on an EC2 instance manually you could run the modules.

Probably the professional services part.

They will probably spend this money on consolidation. Buying up people who provide complementary tools or extensions, maybe a couple that were previously agnostic.

I can see why folks would migrate from Redis to KeyDB as it is Redis protocol compatible.

Did you look at Aerospike? It has transactions, persistence, replication and is fault tolerant.

https://github.com/aerospike/aerospike-server

> key value

I see what you did there

> key value

I see what you did there.

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