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Comment by tinix | Hacker News Reader

how does it take hundreds of hours to swap out a back end when you're using a trivial protocol like redis?

did you switch out the client or something? maybe the problem is not using pluggable adapters? is your business logic coupled to the particular database client API? oof.

I know the cluster clients are different (been there, done that) but hundreds of hours, seriously? or was that just hyperbole?

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I think you might underestimate how little time hundreds of hours is. It's very, very easy to reach your first hundred hours in a task, e.g. taking a 40 hour week, 3 engineers = 120 hours.

If valkey is working, why spend that time reverting to redis, when you could be spending it on things that are actually going to provide value?

Hundreds could be 200 which, at 10 hours a day 5 days a week, is like a week and a half for a team of 3. It seems quite possible if you had to do testing/benchmarking, config changes, deploy the system, watch metrics, etc.

My company is relatively small. With probably 6 separate redis instances deployed in various places (k8s, bare metal, staging and prod environments) and dozens of (micro)services using them it's probably at least 40 hours (one person-week) to migrate everything at this point. Also there are things like documentation, legacy apps that keep working but nobody wants to spend time updating them, naming problems everywhere (renaming "redis" everywhere with zero downtime would be a huge pain), outdated documentation, possibly updates in CI, CD, and e2e tests, and probably more problems that ight become apparent in scale.

And we're honestly not large. For a mid size company, hundreds hours sound reasonable. For a big company the amount of work must be truly staggering.

By switch I mean that all new projects use Valkey instead of Redis, and we've invested hundreds of hours into those new projects. We've also tried stuff with the Valkey Glide client.

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