What is KeyDB?
KeyDB is a high performance fork of Redis with a focus on multithreading, memory efficiency, and high throughput. In addition to multithreading, KeyDB also has features only available in Redis Enterprise such as Active Replication, FLASH storage support, and some not available at all such as direct backup to AWS S3.
KeyDB maintains full compatibility with the Redis protocol, modules, and scripts. This includes the atomicity gurantees for scripts and transactions. Because KeyDB keeps in sync with Redis development KeyDB is a superset of Redis functionality, making KeyDB a drop in replacement for existing Redis deployments.
On the same hardware KeyDB can perform twice as many queries per second as Redis, with 60% lower latency. Active-Replication simplifies hot-spare failover allowing you to easily distribute writes over replicas and use simple TCP based load balancing/failover. KeyDB's higher performance allows you to do more on less hardware which reduces operation costs and complexity.
Why fork Redis?
KeyDB has a different philosophy on how the codebase should evolve. We feel that ease of use, high performance, and a "batteries included" approach is the best way to create a good user experience. While we have great respect for the Redis maintainers it is our opinion that the Redis approach focusses too much on simplicity of the code base at the expense of complexity for the user. This results in the need for external components and workarounds to solve common problems - resulting in more complexity overall.
Because of this difference of opinion features which are right for KeyDB may not be appropriate for Redis. A fork allows us to explore this new development path and implement features which may never be a part of Redis. KeyDB keeps in sync with upstream Redis changes, and where applicable we upstream bug fixes and changes. It is our hope that the two projects can continue to grow and learn from each other.
