Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Yiftach Shoolman of Redis Labs about Redis, Open Source licenses, company culture and more.
Katherine Druckman: Hey, Linux Journal readers, I am Katherine Druckman, joining you again for our awesome, cool podcast. As always, joining us is Doc Searls, our editor-in-chief. Our special guest this time is Yiftach Shoolman of Redis Labs. He is the CTO and co-founder, and he was kind enough to join us. We’ve talked a bit, in preparation for the podcast, about Redis Labs, but I wondered if you could just give us sort of an overview for the tiny fraction of the people listening that don’t know all about Redis Labs and Redis. If you could just give us a little brief intro, that’d be great.
Yiftach Shoolman: Thank you very much for hosting me, first. Redis is an extremely popular in-memory data structure database that’s used by many people as just a caching system, but many of them have shifted from just simple cache to a real database, even in the open source world. Just in terms of numbers, only on Docker Hub, Redis has been launched for almost 1.8 billion times, something like five million every day, so it’s extremely popular. It’s used everywhere. Redis Labs is the company behind the open source. When I say “behind the open source,” we sponsor, I would say, 99% of all the open source activities, if not 100%. We also have enterprise products, which is called Redis Enterprise.
It is available as a cloud service on all the public clouds, as well as a fully-managed Redis cloud service, as well as softwares that you can download and install everywhere. This is our story in general. The way we split between open source and commercial, which is today very tricky, is that we keep the Redis core as open-core BSD, by the way. On top of that, we added what we call enterprise layers that allows Redis to be deployed in an enterprise environment in the most scalable and highly available way. We have all the goodies that you need, including active-active, including data persistence layer, etc., all the boring stuff that the enterprise needs, in addition to that, a lot of security features. In addition to that, we extended Redis with what we call modules. Some of them were initially open source, and then we changed the license. This is probably the reason that you called me.
Katherine Druckman: Right. That was in the news, certainly.
