In a move that’s equal parts predictable and surprising, AWS has decided to make their Valkey-based services significantly cheaper than their Redis counterparts. For those of you who’ve been living under a rock (or perhaps just sensibly ignoring the never-ending open-source licensing drama), Valkey is the successor fork of Redis, spearheaded by AWS in conjunction with several other players in the space and currently residing at the Linux Foundation.
The Numbers Game
Let’s cut to the chase: AWS has launched ElastiCache for Valkey and MemoryDB for Valkey at significant discounts compared to their Elasticache for Redis version offering. These offer the same features and APIs Redis users know and… tolerate, with trivial migration – just at a lower price tag. It’s almost as if AWS discovered that Redis’ service margin was just taking up space in their massive bank vaults.
The Strategic Play
Here’s where it gets interesting. By slashing prices on the Valkey versions, AWS is essentially paying customers to switch – and more importantly, to start thinking of “Valkey” as something distinct from Redis. It’s a move that’s both customer-friendly and strategically brilliant, reminiscent of the Day One AWS of old. Customers get lower costs, and AWS gets to shift the ecosystem towards what’s shaping up to be the obvious Redis successor. It’s the cloud equivalent of having your cake and eating it too, except in this case, the cake is a third off, AWS gets to keep itself in a leadership spot with regards to a technology, and still turning a profit on the whole thing.
The Customer Obsession Angle
AWS loves to tout their customer obsession, and for what feels like the first time in forever, they’ve found a way to align it perfectly with their money obsession. By offering a significant discount on feature-equivalent services, they’re giving customers a tangible benefit while simultaneously advancing their own interests. It’s a rare win-win in the typically zero-sum game of cloud economics.
Comparing Apples to Significantly Cheaper Apples
This isn’t AWS’s first pricing rodeo, but it’s certainly one of their more interesting ones. Usually, AWS price cuts are about as exciting as watching paint dry – a fraction of a cent here, a microscopic percentage there, and generally in some subset of far-flung regions where relatively few customers actually run workloads. This move, however, is substantial enough to make even the most jaded Cloud Economist raise an eyebrow.
The Technical Nitty-Gritty
Let’s not forget the technical side of things. Valkey isn’t just Redis with AWS’s name slapped on it. As per GitHub and as of this writing, it’s got roughly 10 times as many contributors and is hundreds of commits ahead of Redis. It’s like Redis, but with more caffeine, a bigger dev team, and a community that’s suddenly not beholden to keeping requested features stuffed behind a paywall.
The Bottom Line
AWS has managed to pull off something rather clever here. They’re providing significant cost savings to customers, pushing their strategic agenda forward, and still likely making a hefty profit. It’s a masterclass in cloud economics that doesn’t require a PhD to appreciate – just a willingness to switch to a product with a slightly sillier name.
In the end, this move shows that even in the cut-throat world of cloud computing, there’s still room for surprises. And if those surprises come with a massive third off the price tag, well, who are we to complain?
