Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright, team, I’ve just reviewed the post-mortem on the great Redis schism, and frankly, I'm more amused than alarmed. It reads like a glowing review for a dumpster fire. My desk calculator and I have a few notes on this exciting new opportunity to hemorrhage cash.
First, let's talk about the masterclass in vendor strategy on display here. They reel you in for years with the "power of open source"—which is corporate-speak for your engineers provide our quality assurance for free. Then, once your entire infrastructure is inextricably linked to their tech, they pull the rug out with a license change. The "community" is shocked, shocked I tell you! I'm not. This isn't a community; it's a long-con funnel for an enterprise sales team that just woke up. The 37.5% of contributors who walked? That's not a community crisis; that's our unpaid R&D department clocking out for good.
The proposed solution, this "Valkey" fork, is being celebrated as a triumph. A triumph of what, exactly? Unbudgeted emergency projects? I've done some quick math. Migrating our dozens of services will require at least six senior engineers for a full quarter. At their fully-loaded cost, that's a cool half-million dollars just in salaries for them to do work that generates zero new revenue. That's before we hire the inevitable "Valkey Migration Subject Matter Expert" consultants at $500 an hour to read the documentation to our own people.
The article breathlessly points out that Valkey has grown to 49 contributors and averages 80 pull requests a month. You see community vibrancy; I see chaotic, undocumented churn. That’s not a feature, it's a liability. It means our teams will be spending their days navigating breaking changes and "exciting new developments" instead of building our product. We're trading a predictable, expensive problem for an unpredictable, even more expensive one.
So, to be clear, the exciting ROI here is that we get to pay our most expensive employees to rewrite functional code so we can use a less-mature product built by volunteers? Brilliant.
Let’s calculate the "True Cost of Ownership" here, shall we?
The original vendor promised us agility and a low TCO. Now, we're trapped. We either pay their ransom—sorry, their new "sustainable enterprise licensing model"—or we light two million dollars on fire to migrate to its unproven twin. This entire situation is a perfect example of why I treat vendor promises with the same credibility as a get-rich-quick seminar. They sold us a partnership and delivered a hostage situation.
Frankly, you all need to stop treating the company's bank account like it's full of play money from a board game.