I may be biased, but I think this announcement is actually a very good sign for Redis, since it shows that the focus is back to the community edition, that is, the source tree you can just download from GitHub (and I believe this is an effect of the license change: it is possible for the company to work on the public tree without competitors to cut&paste the code in SAAS services).

There are few things that are interesting for me about this discussion related to complexity and use cases outside the scope.

1. You can still download Redis and type "make" and it builds without dependencies whatsoever like in the past, and that's it.

2. Then you run it and use just the subset of Redis that you like. The additional features are not imposed to the user, nor they impact the rest of the user experience. This is, actually, a lot like how it used to be when I handled the project: I added Pub/Sub, Lua scripting, geo indexing, streams, all stuff that, at first, people felt like they were out of scope, and yet many shown to be among the best features. Now it is perfectly clear that Pub/Sub belonged to Redis very well, for instance.

3. This release has improvements to the foundations, in terms of latency, for example. This means that even if you just use your small subset, you can benefit from the continued developments. Sometimes systems take the bad path of becoming less efficient over time.

So I understand the sentiment but I still see Redis remaining quite lean, at least for the version 8 that I just downloaded and I am inspecting right now.

What do you think doesn't belong in Redis? I've always viewed Redis as basically "generic datastructures in a database" — as opposed to say, Memcached, which is a very simple in-memory-only key/value store (that has always been much faster than Redis). It's hard for me to point to specific features and say: that doesn't belong in Redis! Because Redis has generally felt (to me) like a grab bag of data structures + algorithms, that are meant to be fairly low-latency but not maximally so, where your dataset has to fit in RAM (but is regularly flushed to disk so you avoid cold start issues).

This is what I see everywhere. Something is a success and then everybody starts using it wrong. Like Elastic search as database, people use it for searching and then start using it as primary database. Mostly pushed by management BTW not always the software engineer.

> The company I’m working for now keeps trying to add more and more functionality using Redis, that doesn’t belong in Redis, and then complains about Redis scaling issues.

This doesn't sound like a Redis issue, you're just not using the right tool for the job.