AWS was directly funding Redis development, from the article, they are one of the top contributors, they even employed one of the core redis maintainers full time to work on Redis.
I like free money as much as the next guy, but VC isn’t it.
(And also I'd argue most of redis' value to users was already in place before the VC backed company got involved)
From my point of view managed databases only really make sense for toy projects, if you’re using these things at scale it’s much more economical to buy some servers and hire some people of your own, and use plain pre-VC Redis. But big corporations seem to have some kind of a fetish for lighting money on fire, and the fight here is fundamentally over in whose fireplace to do it.
it is more expensive to buy managed, but you offload work. I would imagine toy projects are more cash constrained, and makes more sense to rent cheap servers and roll your own.
On the other hand, larger scale projects would rather pay to offload the work of managing and scaling redis.
Large scale projects can take advantage of economies of scale and hire ops people. I’ve found cloud support pretty lacklustre compared to having someone to talk to face-to-face who understands the whole stack for your particular application.
Of course conventional corporate wisdom says waste as much as you like on services as long as you keep payroll down, that may be a bigger challenge than any of the technical ones.
Where the value is or was is pure sophistry. You don't have a crystal ball, just like everyone else.
All this discussion is envious bellyaching from those that are probably leeches themselves. They just want the free gravy train running for themselves.