Looking through Antirez’s early blog today, I found a great article about the progress of Redis, written in 2010, which has not been translated into Chinese for a long time, so I’m not so polite. The story takes place shortly after Redis became popular, and the author is desperately looking for a reliable financial backer to support the sustainable development of Redis.

About a year ago, Redis was an internal project with no plans to open source. It is nothing more than a solution to a vexing set of web application scaling problems (user session caching, presumably).

But open source is just too attractive for me to resist. I’ve been active in open source for 10 years (veteran). It’s a waste of code just sitting on your own hard drive. So A few weeks ago I made Redis open source and released its first public release. Soon a bunch of Redis users showed up. This led me to continue adding more features to Redis while making the code more stable.

I’ve been a bit lazy lately, and I’ve been working on Redis more than I should — I’m the co-founder of two small companies where I make Web apps and ios apps with friends.

But this year the good things just keep coming. I’ve found Redis more and more popular, and I’ve learned a lot from it. I see the Redis community growing and many friends who are interested in Redis are scrambling to share their knowledge. But it was getting harder and harder for me to do my job while still working on Redis. I started Redis as a hobby and the code was very short. But now it’s getting more complex, and it continues to add features like SortedSets, virtual memory, and AOF persistence.

It is important to remember that Redis is a “database”. When you get a bug report, it’s not like “Flash video crashes!” This type of client bug. There are a lot of businesses using Redis to put real business data in it. You need to fix this bug right away, and you need to provide very stable code. This is my understanding of Redis development, and its users and consumers are not geek programmers who just want to pull your code down and run it.

A business model

I had to find a viable business model for Redis for several reasons. I don’t want to be a business consultant or develop customized versions of Redis for specific companies. I’d rather continue to hack things on Redis than adapt it to a variety of real-world scenarios.

I need a product-based business model (I need to earn my living), but is there a better solution if Redis is not closed source?

My answer is to make some Redis toolkits that make it easier to monitor the working status of Redis. I’m going to sell these kits for a good price so THAT I can earn enough income to develop Redis full-time.

But it’s not easy to develop a commercial-grade tool. You need to write good operational documentation for your clients, and it’s not that much work just to complete the most basic logic function development. It is even harder to sell such a tool to a large number of customers, whose potential customers are typically companies that use Redis very rigorously.

Fortunately, a number of companies have reached out to me to hire me to develop Redis full-time. For weeks now, I’ve been locked in a fight. Should we continue to search for a viable business model for Redis, even though the odds are against it, or join a credible company to take Redis to another milestone?

VMWare

There is a very direct reason why I chose VMWare as the home base of Redis because I had a pleasant conversation with them about the internal implementation of virtual machines.

Ha ha, yes, VMWare is a very powerful technology company, there are a lot of peers doing the same work as me every day. They also want to know the details of the internal implementation of Redis, application scenarios, and further optimizations.

Another important reason is that VMWare has promised me to make Redis more open in the future. They wanted me to continue working on Redis, to serve more developers in a more professional way, which I had never imagined before.

Not only can Redis remain open source, but Redis tools can also remain open source – this was VMWare’s initial olive branch to me.

That’s why I’m so excited about joining VMWare — we can continue to work together to make Redis great.

I am very grateful to VMWare for providing me with such a good opportunity. But what is the status of Redis development so far? Not many at present, it is estimated to be the next step when I have enough time and support (Money & Tech). I’m currently working on some new features in Sicily, my home island, with the little time I have. You might think that Redis is stable enough for a young open source project, but with VMWare’s support, we can do much better with the quality of Redis.

Another thing I really enjoy is spending some time polishing my Redis books, which I started months ago. But time was too tight, so I never finished it.

With VMWare, anything is possible. I can guarantee that you (Redis users) will enjoy the results of our work as soon as possible.

I’m not the only one who cares about sex! If you don’t believe me, check out Derek Collison’s blog post on VMWare’s cloud computing division. VMWare has successfully recruited the core developer of Redis. ^_^

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