Thanks, I really receive good sentiments from the community. I've the feeling that this is not due just to the fact that many developers find Redis useful. It has very serious limits like many other softwares. It is that so far Redis was never proposed as "The Shit", the silver bullet that will save you from your data problem. Is just something I and the other contribs try to do with love, without pretending we are going to save the world. I wish this vision was a bit more common, but (un)fortunately data now is an hot topic with too much money on the table, so feelings are a bit over excited sometimes.
EDIT: Many marketing/business people basically don't understand that you cannot over-sell to developers. The effect is the contrary, you turn people down when you try to say you did something too cool to be true, so this strategy also does not work in the long run.
"without pretending we are going to save the world". I felt a great disturbance in SV, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Just FYI, your comment got flagged but I vouched it. I think these little fragments of appreciation should be okay on HN. Sometimes an upvote just isn't enough.
This is it. Redis is one of the few things in the data-persistence space that is honest about what it can't do.
So many other DBs, caches, or whatever will promise that they can solve all my problems, making me quite angry when I spend weeks developing around them and find out that I've just wasted all that time because their marketing people lied to me.
Graph databases. They can handle your big data! Wait... did you say you had gigabytes of data? Multiple gigabytes? Oh dear, you're going to need to scale up to an enterprise cluster. What sort of madman would keep a whole gigabyte of graph data on one poor little computer?
Riak 1.x. Anyone remember Riak Search? Not the one in 2.x that offloads it to Solr (I don't know if that actually works), but the one before that, the one they deprecated before there was anything to replace it with.
Any database that promises that you can solve your problems with MapReduce. The developers do not actually want you to MapReduce inside their database. It will probably stall your database so hard it makes it unavailable. Their sales people made them put it on the feature checklist.
Antirez, I've accomplished a lot with Redis over the past six years, and I'm always looking for an reason to integrate it into whatever project I'm working on. Keep up the outstanding work.
Is just something I and the other contribs try to do with love, without pretending we are going to save the world. I wish this vision was a bit more common
So much open source is the result of, as is traditionally said, developers scratching their own itch. That's not to say that the developers don't start a project to "fix all the things wrong with the current options", but this is a more pragmatic view than the "this software is the final ultimate solution to problem X" that things eventually grow into having attached to them. I think a lot of proposing things as silver bullets grows out of the community as it gets more popular and is more the users proselytizing their flavor of the week rather than the core developers presenting it as something it's not.
The commercial side is, of course, a different beast, where salesmenship is required for any kind of longevity.
On the same note, I'd put nginx high up there. Aside from the occasional config funkiness (which I can forgive them for) it's an amazingly useful, versatile and efficient tool. Can't complain too much about it. I think nginx and redis are my two favorite often used pieces stack.
Redis has a great developer experience. It's super easy to spin up and to add to applications. There have been a few warts though when it comes to operational experience in production. I really miss things like administrative connections and tls for client connections that I get in the relational db world. Also, using redis in highly regulated environments is challenging because you have to meet all sorts of compliance requirements. As a result, I find myself jumping through a ton of hoops to get redis to work there. It'd be great if it "just worked" in that arena.
The answer to this question is one of the reasons I like Redis so much. It's not one thing, it's many things!
I've used it for a "dumb" cache (key => bytes), a "smart" cache (key => data structure), a message queue, a pub/sub engine, and even a lock manager.
For many of these use cases it's the best, for others, it's more than good enough and not having to add additional infrastructure components to a system is always a plus.