The Google announcement was for the private preview availability of Redis Enterprise on Anthos with GKE, and the availability of Redis Enterprise on the GKE Marketplace, while the AWS announcement makes all of the Redis Enterprise Cloud expanded offerings available in the AWS Marketplace.
On Tuesday, Redis Labs kicked off the first day of their RedisConf2021 customer event, virtualized again this year, by announcing their product roadmap for the year within the context of the same big picture theme as last year’s RedisConf. That theme is that while most customers use Redis in a manner befitting its open source roots – as an open source cache – they should be using Redis as a database. Today, the company’s announcements focus on the extension of their strategic partnerships with two of the big cloud providers, AWS and Google. And while each is significant on their own terms, they are also being presented as validating the same broad theme, that Redis really should be best used as a database, not just an open source cache.
“These extensions of our partnerships with AWS around the AWS Marketplace announcements and with Google Cloud Anthos on the GKE Marketplace, validate the logic of using Redis as a primary database,” said Jason Forget, Chief Revenue Officer and GM at Redis Labs. “We are now in the upper tiers of Microsoft Azure with our Azure-native Azure Cache for Redis Enterprise. But Redis brings capabilities that enables it to be more than a cache to those platforms, and they in turn better enable a lot of our capabilities around Active-Active, Redis Search and JSON. Customers loved the fact we could unlock so many use cases and solve so many business problems – like combining JSON and search.”
Forget said that at this point, the focus is on helping customers and partners understand how much more you can do with Redis beyond caching.
“We know that Redis is more than a cache, but it’s a multi-year process of educating the market, which is why we talked so much about it last year, and this year, and probably next year,” he commented. “We see in our business how people are doing more and more beyond caching, and the cloud providers don’t get involved in small markets. They look to solve big problems on a major scale. These new announcements are a validation that we bring these capabilities for customers to do more with Redis.”
Forget said that both the GKE [Google Kubernetes Engine] Anthos and AWS announcements are important, for different reasons.
With Google, Redis announced the private preview availability of Redis Enterprise on Anthos with GKE, extending Redis Enterprise Kubernetes Operator’s availability to both Anthos and the GKE Marketplace. The Anthos certification lets Redis Enterprise extend a real-time data layer to on-premises, bare-metal, hybrid and multi-cloud environments while maintaining a GKE operational experience. As part of the announcement Redis Enterprise will also be available on the GKE Marketplace.
“The GKE Anthos, just from the Kubernetes perspective, is important,” Forget said. “But if you think what Anthos is, it’s a multi-cloud hybrid story, for when customers want to de-risk by having a multi-cloud strategy. This is significant because it lets us provide that universal level of Redis experience across all of those clouds. Most customers will still be on their cloud journey over the next few years and so it’s important to provide that universal Redis experience across them.”
The AWS announcement makes all of the Redis Enterprise Cloud expanded offerings available in the AWS Marketplace. Redis Enterprise Cloud on AWS is a fully managed Database-as-a-Service deployable in hybrid and multi-cloud implementations.
“The AWS announcement is important because part of bringing technology to customers is enabling customers to best leverage it,” Forget said. “This AWS Marketplace announcement enables that. It lets customers leverage technology through the marketplace with integrated billing, and ease of deployment, taking those off the table. It’s all about meeting customers in the market, in the channel where they are. That’s the beauty of marketplaces, partnerships and channels for the customer. We do all the work together to streamline things.”
Look for additional, similar partnerships ahead.
“We will have news with more partnerships with cloud partners in the foreseeable future,” Ofer Bengal, Redis Labs’ CEO, announced in his keynote on Tuesday.
