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Comment by Axsuul | Hacker News Reader

Has Salvatore ever considered forking redis into a legal entity and providing official commercial support? I'm willing to bet alot of startups and enterprises don't use redis because of the lack of this.

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Hello, I considered it, in some way this could be good, allowing me to have a team of developers to build a better Redis in less time. On the other side there is always the risk of ruining the project a bit, when you take external money and need to be profitable and so forth. But probably the biggest reason is that I don't feel like that currently is a good idea to travel more, work long hours, and so forth. I try to work my 40 hours and use the remaining time for family and other activities. So far the sponsorship model has worked well, even if there are rooms for improvements for sure.

According to the Redis support page, Pivotal sponsors Redis and they provide commercial support services for it.

Although, to be honest, the page linked from the Redis site (http://www.pivotal.io/big-data/redis) doesn't seem to have much to say on the matter. Looks like an ad for their cloud platform, and I wouldn't have guessed they offer support for Redis itself.

Ah yes, our brochureware site is too vague for my tastes, but Pivotal-the-company is mostly pitched at F500s, not engineers per se.

At the coalface, Pivotal also includes Pivotal Labs (for whom I work and from which the larger company took its name), which includes people who've done a lot of production Redis work.

And we can always ask Salvatore for a tip if we get stuck.

Similarly, I have access to Hadoop, Gemfire, Greenplum, Cloud Foundry, RabbitMQ or Spring devs for help. Being inside the same tent is nifty.

> "brochureware site" <- don't be too hard on yourselves, there's plenty of goodness there too :)

Besides Pivotal's commercial support for Redis (which, from what I've heard, is superb) there are also at least two hardcore Redis community members who're providing professional support for Redis deployments - for more details, contact Michel Martens and Damian Janowski.

Redis Labs, my employer, is also heavily into Redis (duh) so naturally we give support for our product line that consists of a Redis on-prem solution and a cloud service.

Our designers, no lie, are awesome. But we are definitely writing copy aimed at the C-suite right now, on the developer front it's a bit scantier but improving.

I see you guys have a service offering on PWS. Nifty.

I know how that goes - with our RLEC we're taking the same approach. PWS is amazing, arguably the easiest to work and integrate with for us :)

As for goodness @ the Pivotal site, this is one of my favorite - dying to see it grow: https://support.pivotal.io/hc/en-us/categories/200308268-Ope...

Feel free to draft stuff and send it in. The guy you want to talk to is Dan Mikusa, who writes the majority of our KB articles.

Salvatore is just one guy, and he probably doesn't want to waste his time managing a customer support organization.

Meanwhile, according to the official website [1], somebody else is already doing it:

> Pivotal, the official sponsor of Redis, offers Redis support for developers and 24x7 production Redis deployments.

And of course nothing prevents any other company from competing in the same space. Perhaps one of the startups that use Redis a lot could "pivot" into a Redis commercial support company.

[1] http://redis.io/support

Do you mean production support for hosted redis instances? If so, loads of companies offer this, most notably AWS through their ElasticCache service.

I can see a broader need for enterprise-level support for custom builds, perhaps.

Here's Redis Labs' (my employer) comparison table of cloud services for your reference: https://redislabs.com/redis-comparison. It's only slightly outdated (missing the MongoHQ-cum-Compose.io offering) and we'll probably add it in the near future.

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