Redis and the Cost of Ambition

A critical retrospective on how Redis lost its identity through feature bloat and corporate ambition. Starting as a simple, elegant in-memory data structure server that nailed its protocol, threading model, and data primitives, Redis gradually tried to become a document database, search engine, event streaming platform, time-series DB, and AI vector store — none of which it does as well as dedicated tools. The licensing switch from BSD to AGPL in 2024 further alienated users. The author argues Valkey's rise is the market's verdict: most Redis users just want the fast, simple cache and data-structure server from 2011, not an ever-expanding platform chasing every trend.