Salvatore Sanfilippo – Welcome to Redis Labs

I usually begin this type of post with a variation on the sentence “Today I am delighted to…” Today, however, these words aren’t filler — they truly are the best way to express that I am delighted to welcome Antirez (a.k.a Salvatore Sanfilippo), Redis’ creator, to Redis. You can read more about this development on Antirez’s blog and in our press release, but here’s another perspective – mine.

I’m a Redis geek and if you’re reading this then I’m guessing that you are one too. Redis is awesome, but I suppose that each of us finds in it the things that she/he relates to most. As for myself, the Redis community is what I feel strongest about. In fact, if there’s one key value that really sets the Redis project apart to me, it is the people who build it, develop for it and use it with their applications.

Redis’ community is big. It comprises college students, veteran developers, garage startups and multi-billion-dollar companies – they’re all a part of it. For the last couple of years, I’ve had the honor and privilege of being a part of it and witnessing its evolution firsthand. I’ve met a fair share of its members online and IRL, and I work with many of them on a daily basis at Redis. I’d like to believe that I’ve given something back to the community as well 🙂

Ten months after releasing the first public version, Antirez wrote that he chose to develop Redis because it would probably keep him “interested for the next decade.” Half a decade later, his key tenets for Redis still ring true. Early adopters became the majority. Simplicity remains a central theme. Feature bloat is all but non-existent. His pragmatic roadmapping approach and the ~95% of code that Antirez wrote brought Redis to where it is today.

There’s really only one sentence in his 2009 post that’s not true anymore – “Redis can’t be considered a successful project yet, it’s just too early.” Over the past six years, Antirez and the community have multi-handedly made Redis into one of the most successful open source software projects in existence. This would not have been possible had it not been for the project’s sponsorship by VMWare and Pivotal, companies whose commitments to Open Source Software are inspiring. The time is now right for Redis to take on its natural role as the next successor.

Everyone else here at Redis are Redis geeks like myself. We eat, breath and live Redis, and we’re absolutely certain that we’re just getting to the interesting parts of the first Redis decade. We want to make sure that Redis keeps defining the meaning of performance and scale delivered with simplicity. We are passionate about this, and we have the resources to help continue making it spectacular. Our company is of the Redis community and for the Redis community.

So today, on behalf of the entire Redis team, I am delighted to welcome Salvatore Sanfilippo, Redis’ creator and community member numero uno, as he joins us. Together with Antirez and all of our fellow Redis community members, we’ll make Redis even better.