The philosophy behind Redis

Salvatore Sanfilippo has, over the lifespan of the project, articulated a distinct view and opinion about the direction and functionality of Redis. In a January 2015 blog post about benchmarking Redis against other databases, Sanfilippo states "I don't want to convince developers to adopt Redis. We just do our best in order to provide a suitable product, and we are happy if people can get work done with it. That's where my marketing wishes end." Sanfilippo and a small core group of Redis developers follow the successful open source governance model of the "benevolent dictator for life" (BDL), where a single person is the ultimate arbitrator of what is committed into the Redis code base. The success of the BDL model, evidenced by open source projects such as Linux kernel development and the Python programming language, is replicated in Redis with Sanfilippo as its primary developer and maintainer.

The BDL model failure modes can be catastrophic if the dictator abandons the project, or worse, is incapacitated through illness or death. Another significant problem that has emerged particularly with Redis is when potential contributors submit pull requests and action on their pull requests is delayed, or more often, ignored. To be fair, the volume of changes that must be examined, tested, and merged into the main code base can be substantial and requires a passionate and dedicated gatekeeper. Linus Torvalds, the initial creator and current BDL for the Linux kernel project, has seen his role evolve more into merging code contributed by others and providing vision and leadership for Linux than writing code himself. Sanfilippo, while acknowledging this problem in a thread on the main Redis e-mail distribution, gives two main reasons for continuing with the current BDL model for Redis:

Sanfilippo's vision of Redis, as an easy-to-configure, small-memory-footprint (for itself and NOT for its datasets!) and reliable key-value data store has been crucial to the continued rise in Redis's popularity among developers and organizations. His vision does cause tension, especially when new features for Redis are proposed, such as expiring specific sub-values in a hash or offering loadable modules for optional functionality, and these features are rejected for inclusion into Redis. Sanfilippo's desire to keep Redis small and focused on being a memory-only database drives his decisions and development practice.

In 2011 blog post, he elucidated his vision for Redis in a seven-point manifesto for Redis and the Redis development process. Briefly, here are the seven points: