Keeping Discourse on an open-source key-value storage system

Development

AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around the future of Discourse’s reliance on Redis as a key-value store, following Redis Labs’ decision to make Redis no longer open source. mcdanlj raises concerns about the potential shift to proprietary software and suggests migrating to open-source forks like Valkey or Redict. Valkey, backed by former Redis contributors and corporate sponsors, is highlighted as the most promising alternative, with significant performance and memory improvements, and an upcoming 8.0 release. Moin references a related Meta Discourse thread, while Jagster humorously notes that searching for ‘redis open source fork’ yields the best results. mcdanlj emphasizes that Valkey appears to be the mainline continuation of Redis development, with accelerated innovation.

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Now that Redis Labs has decided to make Redis no longer open source, are there any plans yet for moving to one of the open source forks, such as Valkey or Redict, for what key-value store is officially supported, for what is set up by default for a discourse_docker deployment, and ultimately for a discourse_docker migration for existing deployments?

I guess that as long as discourse_docker is still pinned to redis 7.0.7 in image/base/install-redis there is time to think, but I would hope that it wouldn’t move forward to a non-open-source version from Redis Labs. I could imagine that Redis Labs will eventually have a financial incentive to create incompatibility to try to lock users into their fork, away from open source to proprietary software. Redict, for example, explicitly says that (current) 7.2.4 is the last release that will be compatible for a seamless migration.

Given that Valkey seems to have attracted the bulk of the prior redis contributors by simple quantity of past contribution, and having substantial corporate sponsorship, it feels to me like the most obvious choice? Redict is focusing on the existing capability; Valkey is where I’d expect more innovation. Binbin Zhu, reportedly responsible for more contributions to Redis than Redis Labs, is one of the core team members for Valkey.

A couple weeks ago, Linux Weekly News summarized the status at that point:

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Ah, my searches for “valkey” and “redict” didn’t find that answer.

Thanks!

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Because you did same than every users… looking for solution instead of issue :wink:

redis open source fork is the winner at search terms category.

Sorry a sidestep to OT but that was one very delicious example of main issue of searches…

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Valkey is getting performance and memory footprint improvements. The upcoming Valkey 8 looks amazing.

It seems clear to me at this point that “Redis” is the proprietary fork, and “Valkey” is the mainline. It looks from outside like the fork has actually accelerated work in Valkey.