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Today marks another milestone in the history of Redis. After maintaining the open source Redis project for 11 years, Salvatore Sanfilippo (a.k.a. antirez) has decided to take a step back.
We certainly understand Salvatore’s rationale—single-handedly overseeing an open source project of this scale for more than a decade is a huge task. And while no transition of this size is ever stress free, with the release of Redis 6 and a pair of homegrown technical leaders from within the Redis community ready to step up (meet Yossi Gottlieb and Oran Agra), we’re all confident that the Redis project will be in great hands in a new, community-driven model.
Critically, Salvatore is not leaving the Redis project. He will continue to be a vital member of the Redis community, and serve as a member of the technical advisory board of Redis. But by stepping away from the day-to-day work of maintaining Redis—bug fixes, version releases, and contributions, and much more—Salvatore is gaining the ability to focus on new ways to advance Redis.
As Salvatore has said, the Redis project is in an exciting new stage, welcoming many new individual contributors to the core project and creating modules to expand the ways Redis can be used as a primary database. And as active members of the Redis community working closely with Salvatore for more than ten years, Yossi (who recently released the RedisRaft project) and Oran have made many vital contributions in this evolution. They also share our belief in collaboration and transparency with the Redis community—working to create software that offers the most significant benefits to developers with the greatest simplicity.
Furthermore, the core of the open source Redis project will remain under the 3-Clause BSD license, and as expressed by the new governance structure for Redis, the project will be guided by a core team of contributors from the community selected according to their involvement and contributions. We believe this moment is an excellent opportunity for the community to contribute, give feedback, and help improve the Redis project.
In the coming weeks, Yossi and Oran, together with the other members of this new core team, will begin sharing what’s ahead for Redis. All of us are committed to making this transition as seamless as possible for the Redis community.
But before we look ahead to the future, let’s take a moment to give Salvatore our heartfelt thanks for everything he’s done for Redis since that fateful first link was posted on Hacker News way back in 2009.
Thanks to Salvatore, Redis has become known for its unique and superior software design based on simple but smart architecture principles. Redis is widely loved because it is easy to learn and simple to deploy, with well-supported documentation. And, of course, Redis is very, very fast.
These days Redis powers almost any online application you can think of, across all industries and market segments. It has been voted the Most Loved Database for four consecutive years in Stack Overflow’s global developer survey, named the most widely used database in the Amazon Web Services cloud, and is the most-launched database daily from Docker Hub.
Working closely with Salvatore over the past five years has been a true privilege, and we’re incredibly proud that our collaboration has not only made Redis the success it is today, but that it’s positioned to continue into the next decade of Redis. We can’t thank Salvatore enough for what he has done to grow Redis and advance new and better ways to develop software.
Together with Salvatore, we’ve never felt more optimistic about the future of the Redis community. The Redis community has always been the primary driver of Redis’s growth and success, and as we enter this new stage together, we believe the best is yet to come!
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