The race to replace Redis [LWN.net]

The race to replace Redis

Posted Apr 5, 2024 16:36 UTC (Fri) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: The race to replace Redis by pizza
Parent article: The race to replace Redis

> When it comes to providing services, it's pretty much impossible to compete with the giant players' scale

Actually that very much depends on the amount of margins those giant players want (and think they can afford) to charge. Even on-premises is competitive when the alternative is something someone else slapped a 80% services margin on. Never forget that the giant players are not so numerous and they would be quite happy to constitute an oligopoly for everything other players could not run themselves.

Going proprietary does not protect an ISV it ensures all the other players will invest in something else and gradually squeeze it out of the market (but the money is good VC-side while the squeezing is going on).

Long-term viability seems something open enough your product is accepted, and innovative enough part of the market prefers paying you for early access and a say in the product evolution. And there will be some freeloaders but those freeloaders will also keep cloud giants from making too much profit at your expense. One way or the other the level of margins an Oracle or Microsoft enjoyed before the internet seems out of reach now.

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The race to replace Redis

Posted Apr 5, 2024 17:11 UTC (Fri) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

Also consider this. None of the “traditional” ISVs have made their money on software dev for a long looong time. For a couple of persons that worked on code there was an army of people doing QA sales ticketing and some form of service deploying software on premises (and if you were too small to deploy yourself you’d better partner with some consulting giant that would deploy things for your customers or you would miss out most sales).

Cloud services are not so different you still have a smallish core of people developing things and a mass of people making money out of it by deploying code operationally. I’m not sure the ratio of core people/other people has changed so much.