KeyDB (YC S20) Joins Snap
We're excited to announce that KeyDB is joining Snap! Not only does Snap provide a long-term home for KeyDB that shares our values, but this has already enabled us to expand the scope of the open source project, consolidating KeyDB's previously Enterprise codebase into one unified project under the BSD-3 license!
KeyDB started in early 2019 as an experiment to add multithreading support to Redis. It has grown from that humble start to well over 3 million downloads since launch. Very quickly we became overwhelmed by the positive community response and began working on the project full time; but it was clear we would need even more help. Joining YC was a game changer, the additional investment allowed us to hire new developers and take on new challenges we couldn’t before, not to mention the mentorship which proved invaluable. As with all good things there were downsides: we were now a business and had to worry about things like payroll and revenue. This created pressure to keep our best features locked away in a separate closed source version we could sell. However, it never felt right that our best work was hidden away and would not be seen by the majority of our community.
By joining Snap, we have found a path to focus fully on what we do best: writing high-performance database code. It was important to us that Snap shared our commitment to open source: KeyDB would not have gotten to where it is without the support of the open source community, and continued involvement is critical to the success of the project. We’re very excited about what we will accomplish with the shared talent here at Snap and in the Open Source community at large. The first step down this road is fully open sourcing all of our previously closed source code, but rest assured there is much more to come!
KeyDB Pro (Enterprise) represents two years of work towards improving what we started in our original open source project. It is completely rearchitected to break through the performance bottlenecks we have in the existing Open Source version. We'd encourage you to read our v6.3.0 Feature Summary and roadmap for more details, and of course take a look at the benchmarks! We know many of you are interested in KeyDB's FLASH functionality that was also in Pro. Due to contractual obligations predating the news today we are not able to open source this feature until early fall. We are really excited to finally make these features available to the community and hope you will enjoy them as much as we enjoyed writing them.
We hope you'll join us in the next chapter for KeyDB. We stand on the shoulder of many giants in the open source world, and are deeply grateful for all the bug reports, feature requests, and code contributions you've sent us over the years. We're happy to be able to focus on the community as we enter the next chapter of KeyDB's evolution.