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Open Source Databases

Open Source Redis Fork 'Valkey' Has Momentum, Improvements, and Speed, Says Dirk Hohndel (thenewstack.io) 16

"Dirk Hohndel, a Linux kernel developer and long-time open source leader, wanted his audience at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2024 Summit China to know he's not a Valkey developer," writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. "He's a Valkey user and fan." [Hohndel] opened his speech by recalling how the open source, high-performance key/value datastore Valkey had been forked from Redis... Hohndel emphasized that "forks are good. Forks are one of the key things that open source licenses are for. So, if the maintainer starts doing things you don't like, you can fork the code under the same license and do better..." In this case, though, Redis had done a "bait-and-switch" with the Redis code, Hohndale argued. This was because they had made an all-too-common business failure: They hadn't realized that "open source is not a business model...."

While the licensing change is what prompted the fork, Hohndel sees leadership and technical reasons why the Valkey fork is likely to succeed. First, two-thirds of the formerly top Redis maintainers and developers have switched to Valkey. In addition, AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle, under the Linux Foundation's auspices, all support Valkey. When both the technical and money people agree, good things can happen.

The other reason is that Valkey already looks like it will be the better technical choice. That's because the recently announced Valkey 8.0, which builds upon the last open source version of Redis, 7.2.4, introduces serious speed improvements and new features that Redis users have wanted for some time. As [AWS principal engineer Madelyn] Olson said at Open Source Summit North America earlier this year, "Redis really didn't want to break anything." Valkey wants to move a bit faster. How much faster? A lot. Valkey 8.0 overhauls Redis's single-threaded event loop threading model with a more sophisticated multithreaded approach to I/O operations. Hohndel reported that on his small Valkey-powered aircraft tracking system, "I see roughly a threefold improvement in performance, and I stream a lot of data, 60 million data points a day."

The article notes that Valkey is already being supported by major Linux distros including AlmaLinux, Fedora, and Alpine.
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Open Source Redis Fork 'Valkey' Has Momentum, Improvements, and Speed, Says Dirk Hohndel

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  • uncanny (Score:3, Funny)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Sunday September 01, 2024 @10:07AM (#64753320)

    redis fork valley

  • It does spell "high customizability" though. Can anybody give me a brief summary what Lua actually does and can do in this context?

    • In Redis case, it allows you to make a sort of "store procedure" that executes on the server.

      There are ways to chain a series of Redis commands together to make a transaction (the commands execute on the server, but everything else executes on the client, meaning you're dragging data to and fro). The Lua facility allows you to do that transaction on the Redis server itself, and have some (reasonably basic) decision making and processing happen there too. This avoids moving data around that you don't want.

      So

  • Web scale just became quite underwhelming.

  • So... they are saying Valkey is gonna break things?
  • Even after using Redis multiple projects, we never got past the very very basic use case of (key, value) storage with either an automated or manual way to clear out the older entries from time to time.

    The large number of features around querying, managing, ... we never really used.

    MVP easier, cheaper and less risky in the long-term?

    • Agreed - and probably 90% of all Redis users are much the same (because they really just use Redis as a cache). However, if you really do want to store things in a reasonably safe database, then Redis does it quite nicely. Redis also provides a pub/sub capability, which is used pretty extensively in web apps where you want an offline "worker" to do things for you.

      (I say "reasonably safe" because Redis doesn't have any levels of security - you're either a super user or you're nothing. As such, a compromised

      • It's about longevity, maintenance cost, and system reimplementation cost.

        The more features you use in Redis, or any service, the harder and more costly it is to maintain and more costly to replace in the future.

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