🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Oh, this is just wonderful. A new release to circle on my calendar. I'll be sure to mark September 15th right next to my quarterly budget review, as a little reminder of what innovation looks like. It’s so refreshing to see a solution that solves "real operational headaches." The headaches I get from reading my P&L statement are, I assume, not on the roadmap.

I especially admire the promise of solving these headaches "without the licensing restrictions or unpredictable costs you face with Redis." That’s a truly admirable goal. It's like offering someone a "free" puppy. The initial acquisition cost is zero, which looks fantastic on a spreadsheet. It’s the subsequent "unpredictable costs"—the food, the vet bills, the chewed-up furniture, the emergency surgery after it swallows a sock—that tend to get lost in the marketing material.

They say it's a fork and that the "same engineers who built Redis" are now on board. That's lovely. It gives me great confidence to know the people who built the house we're currently living in have now built a new, very similar house next door and are encouraging us to move. They're even leaving the door unlocked for us. How thoughtful. They just neglect to mention the cost of packing, hiring the movers, changing our address on every document we own, and discovering the plumbing in the new place is subtly different in a way that requires an entirely new set of wrenches.

Let’s do some quick, back-of-the-napkin math on the Total Cost of Ownership for this "free" software.

• Migration: We’ll pull four of our most expensive engineers off product development for, let's be optimistic, three months. At a blended rate, that’s a mere $150,000 in personnel cost, generously ignoring the value of the features they aren't building.
• Training: The team needs to get up to speed on the nuances. That's another $25,000 for some online courses and "official" documentation nobody will read.
• The Inevitable Consultant: When the migration inevitably hits a snag because a critical feature works 2% differently, we'll need to hire a "Valkey Implementation Specialist." Let’s budget a conservative $80,000 for the privilege of paying someone to read the documentation for us.
• Operational Risk: What’s the cost of a day of downtime during the cutover? Oh, let's just pencil in a cool quarter-million and pray it's only one day.

So, to save on "unpredictable" licensing fees, we've proactively spent nearly half a million dollars. It's a bold financial strategy, one might say. It’s a bit like preemptively breaking your own leg to save on future skiing expenses.

If you’ve been following Valkey since it forked from Redis, this release represents a major milestone.

It certainly is a milestone. It’s the point where a free alternative becomes expensive enough to warrant a line item in my budget titled "Miscellaneous Unforced Errors." The promise of enterprise-grade features is the cherry on top. I’ve been a CFO for twenty years; I know that "enterprise-grade" is just a polite way of saying “You will now require a dedicated support contract and a team of specialists to operate this.”

So, yes, thank you for the announcement. I've circled September 15th on my calendar. I’ve marked it as the day I'm taking my finance team out for a very expensive lunch, paid for by the "unpredictable licensing fees" we'll continue to pay our current vendor. Funny how predictable those costs suddenly seem.