From Digital Age to Nano Age. WorldWide.

Tag: Microsoft

Atoms Lanka Solutions > Microsoft
Robotic Automations

UK probes Amazon and Microsoft over AI partnerships with Mistral, Anthropic, and Inflection | TechCrunch

April 24, 2024 5:47 PM0


The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is launching preliminary enquiries into whether the close-knit tie-ups and hiring practices involving Microsoft, Amazon and a trio of AI startup falls within the scope of its merger rules — and whether the arrangements could impact competition in the U.K. market.

The announcement comes amid growing scrutiny of Big Tech’s fresh approach to M&A in the world of artificial intelligence (AI), where the so-called “quasi-merger” has emerged as flavor of the day as a means of — apparently — bypassing regulatory oversight.

Microsoft’s investment in, and close partnership with, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI attracted the CMA’s scrutiny late last year, with the regulator launching a formal “invitation to comment,” aimed at relevant stakeholders in the AI and business spheres. Since then, Microsoft hired the core team behind Inflection AI, a U.S.-based OpenAI rival it had previously invested in, and earlier this month Microsoft launched a new London AI hub fronted by former Inflection and DeepMind scientist Jordan Hoffmann.

Elsewhere, Microsoft also recently invested in Mistral AI, a French AI startup working on foundational models that could be construed as rivalling OpenAI.

And then there’s Amazon, which recently completed its $4 billion investment in Anthropic — another U.S.-based AI company working on large language models.

Collectively, these latest deals

The CMA’s executive director of mergers, Joel Bamford, said that it’s merely inviting comments from relevant parties, as it assesses whether these various partnerships are tantamount to mergers, and whether it might impact competition in the U.K.’s fast-growing AI industry.

“Foundation models have the potential to fundamentally impact the way we all live and work, including products and services across so many U.K. sectors – healthcare, energy, transport, finance and more,” Bamford said in a statement. “So open, fair, and effective competition in foundation model markets is critical to making sure the full benefits of this transformation are realised by people and businesses in the UK, as well as our wider economy where technology has a huge role to play in growth and productivity.”

This is a development story, refresh for updates.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

US says Russian hackers stole federal government emails during Microsoft cyberattack | TechCrunch

April 22, 2024 11:38 AM0


U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has confirmed that Russian government-backed hackers stole emails from several U.S. federal agencies as a result of an ongoing cyberattack at Microsoft.

In a statement published Thursday, the U.S. cyber agency said the cyberattack, which Microsoft initially disclosed in January, allowed the hackers to steal federal government emails “through a successful compromise of Microsoft corporate email accounts.”

The hackers, which Microsoft calls “Midnight Blizzard,” also known as APT29, are widely believed to work for Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR.

“Midnight Blizzard’s successful compromise of Microsoft corporate email accounts and the exfiltration of correspondence between agencies and Microsoft presents a grave and unacceptable risk to agencies,” said CISA.

The federal cyber agency said it issued a new emergency directive on April 2 ordering civilian government agencies to take action to secure their email accounts, based on new information that the Russian hackers were ramping up their intrusions. CISA made details of the emergency directive public on Thursday after giving affected federal agencies a week to reset passwords and secure affected systems.

CISA did not name the affected federal agencies that had emails stolen, and a spokesperson for CISA did not immediately comment when reached by TechCrunch.

News of the emergency directive was first reported by Cyberscoop last week.

The emergency directive comes as Microsoft faces increasing scrutiny of its security practices after a spate of intrusions by hackers of adversarial nations. The U.S. government is heavily reliant on the software giant for hosting government emails accounts.

Microsoft went public in January after identifying that the Russian hacking group broke into some corporate email systems, including the email accounts of “senior leadership team and employees in our cybersecurity, legal, and other functions.” Microsoft said the Russian hackers were searching for information about what Microsoft and its security teams knew about the hackers themselves. Later, the technology giant said the hackers also targeted other organizations outside of Microsoft.

Now it is known that some of those affected organizations included U.S. government agencies.

By March, Microsoft said it was continuing its efforts to expel the Russian hackers from its systems in what the company described as an “ongoing attack.” In a blog post, the company said the hackers were attempting to use “secrets” they had initially stolen in order to access other internal Microsoft systems and exfiltrate more data, such as source code.

Microsoft did not immediately comment when asked by TechCrunch on Thursday what progress the company is making in remediating the attack since March.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) concluded its investigation of an earlier 2023 breach of U.S. government emails attributed to China government-backed hackers. The CSRB, an independent body that includes representatives from government and cyber experts in the private sector, blamed a “cascade of security failures at Microsoft.” Those allowed the China-backed hackers to steal a sensitive email key that permitted broad access to both consumer and government emails.

In February, the U.S. Department of Defense notified 20,000 individuals that their personal information was exposed to the internet after a Microsoft-hosted cloud email server was left without a password for several weeks in 2023.

Russian spies keep hacking into Microsoft in ‘ongoing attack,’ company says


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Watch: Google's Gemini Code Assist wants to use AI to help developers

April 18, 2024 7:17 PM0


Can AI eat the jobs of the developers who are busy building AI models? The short answer is no, but the longer answer is not yet settled. News this week that Google has a new AI-powered coding tool for developers, straight from the company’s Google Cloud Next 2024 event in Las Vegas, means that competitive pressures between major tech companies to build the best service to help coders write more code, more quickly is still heating up.

Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot service that has similar outlines has been steadily working toward enterprise adoption. Both companies want to eventually build developer-helping tech that can understand a company’s codebase, allowing it to offer up more tailored suggestions and tips.

Startups are in the fight as well, though they tend to focus more tailored solutions than the broader offerings from the largest tech companies; Pythagora, Tusk and Ellipsis from the most recent Y Combinator batch are working on app creation from user prompts, AI agents for bug-squashing and turning GitHub comments into code, respectively.

Everywhere you look, developers are building tools and services to help their own professional cohort.

Developers learning to code today won’t know a world in which they don’t have AI-powered coding helps. Call it the graphic calculator era for software builders. But the risk — or the worry, I suppose — is that in time the AI tools that are ingesting mountains of code to get smarter to help humans do more will eventually be able to do enough that fewer humans are needed to do the work of writing code for companies themselves. And if a company can spend less money and employ fewer people, it will; no job is safe, but some roles are just more difficult to replace at any given moment.

Thankfully, given the complexities of modern software services, ever-present tech debt and an infinite number of edge cases, what big tech and startups are busy building today seem to be very useful coding helps and not something ready to replace or even reduce the number of humans building them. For now. I wouldn’t take the other end of that bet on a multi-decade time frame.

And for those looking for an even deeper dive into what Google revealed this week, you can head here for our complete rundown, including details on exactly how Gemini Code Assist works, and Google’s in-depth developer walkthrough from Cloud Next 2024.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Microsoft employees exposed internal passwords in security lapse | TechCrunch

April 18, 2024 1:39 AM0


Microsoft has resolved a security lapse that exposed internal company files and credentials to the open internet.

Security researchers Can Yoleri, Murat Özfidan and Egemen Koçhisarlı with SOCRadar, a cybersecurity company that helps organizations find security weaknesses, discovered an open and public storage server hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service that was storing internal information relating to Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

The Azure storage server housed code, scripts and configuration files containing passwords, keys and credentials used by the Microsoft employees for accessing other internal databases and systems.

But the storage server itself was not protected with a password and could be accessed by anyone on the internet.

Yoleri told TechCrunch that the exposed data could potentially help malicious actors identify or access other places where Microsoft stores its internal files. Identifying those storage locations “could result in more significant data leaks and possibly compromise the services in use,” Yoleri said.

The researchers notified Microsoft of the security lapse on February 6, and Microsoft secured the spilling files on March 5.

When reached by email, a spokesperson for Microsoft did not provide comment by the time of publication. In a statement shared after publication on Wednesday, Microsoft’s Jeff Jones told TechCrunch: “Though the credentials should not have been exposed, they were temporary, accessible only from internal networks, and disabled after testing. We thank our partners for responsibly reporting this issue.”

Jones did not say for how long the cloud server was exposed to the internet, or if anyone other than SOCRadar discovered the exposed data inside.

This is the latest security gaffe at Microsoft as the company tries to rebuild trust with its customers after a series of cloud security incidents in recent years. In a similar security lapse last year, researchers found that Microsoft employees were exposing their own corporate network logins in code published to GitHub.

Microsoft also came under fire last year after the company admitted it did not know how China-backed hackers stole an internal email signing key that allowed the hackers broad access to Microsoft-hosted inboxes of senior U.S. government officials. An independent board of cyber experts tasked with investigating the email breach wrote in their report, published last week, that the hackers succeeded because of a “cascade of security failures at Microsoft.”

In March, Microsoft said that it continues to counter an ongoing cyberattack that allowed Russian state-backed hackers to steal portions of the company’s source code and internal emails from Microsoft corporate executives.

Updated with comment from Microsoft.

Microsoft reveals how hackers stole its email signing key… kind of


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

TechCrunch Minute: Quantum computing’s next era could be led by Microsoft and Quantinuum | TechCrunch

April 17, 2024 5:13 AM0


The tech world is incredibly focused on AI and its applications today, but artificial intelligence is hardly the only place where progress is being made. If you want to get really into the weeds, pay attention to the progress that quantum computing is making, as made evident recently by an announcement from Microsoft and Quantinuum.

The pair of companies made what TechCrunch described as a “major breakthrough in quantum error correction,” which could make quantum computing systems far more usable than before. The gist is that they encoded several physical qubits into a single logical qubit, which made it easier to detect and correct errors. The error rate in quantum computing is a material issue to the technology’s performance, making the news that the two companies managed “run more than 14,000 experiments without a single error” pretty big news.

So, if you get a little tired of consumer AI apps, and new NFTs or whatever your personal technology bugaboo is, just know that deep in the labs there is real progress being made on tech that could blast what we have today out of the water. And that, my friends, is encouraging!


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Microsoft AI gets a new London hub fronted by former Inflection and DeepMind scientist Jordan Hoffmann | TechCrunch

April 16, 2024 8:13 PM0


Microsoft has announced a new London hub for its recently unveiled consumer AI division. It will be fronted by Jordan Hoffmann, an AI scientist and engineer Microsoft recently picked up from high-profile AI startup Inflection AI, which Microsoft invested in last year.

The news comes some three weeks after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella unveiled a new consumer AI division headed up by Inflection AI’s founders, which include Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind, the AI company Google acquired in 2014.

At the time, Nadella said that “several members of the Inflection team” also joined Microsoft’s new AI unit (Bloomberg reported that most actually joined). We now know that one of those was Hoffmann, a former PhD student who joined DeepMind as a research scientist in 2020 before jumping ship for Inflection AI, after Suleyman founded the startup in 2022 and started poaching employees from DeepMind and Meta.

In a blog post today, Suleyman calls Hoffmann an “exceptional AI scientist and engineer,” and with Suleyman himself reporting directly to Nadella in the U.S., Hoffmann will take charge of the new London unit.

Suleyman noted that they will launch new job postings in the “coming weeks and months” to find fresh AI talent to join Hoffmann at Microsoft’s Paddington office, where they will develop new language models and associated infrastructure and tooling.

This also feeds into another recent announcement made in conjunction with the U.K. government, where Microsoft said it would invest £2.5 billion ($3.15 billion) in the U.K. over the next three years, which will include expanding its data center footprint and training “more than one million people for the AI economy.”

The U.K. is considered among the top-tier countries globally in terms of AI R&D investment, behind the U.S. and China, and with Google’s DeepMind also based in the U.K. capital, we could be about to see a major talent tug-of-war between two of the frontrunners in the race for AI dominance.

On a related note, Google DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis was recently awarded a knighthood for “services to artificial intelligence.”

TechCrunch reached out to Microsoft for comment on the scale of its U.K. AI hub, but the company said it wasn’t revealing any other details at present.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

LinkedIn targets users caught between TikTok and what used to be Twitter | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 11:31 AM0


Two weeks ago, TechCrunch broke the news that LinkedIn was getting into games, helping users “deepen relationships” through puzzle-based interactions. And on Wednesday, TechCrunch reported that the Microsoft-owned social network was experimenting with short-form videos.

It’s as if LinkedIn is targeting a whole new “type” of user — one caught in limbo somewhere between two other well-known social networks.

Wordle’s viral growth kicked off on Twitter, leading The New York Times to dole out a reported seven-figure sum for the web-based word game. And TikTok is well past the billion-user mark, recently becoming the first non-game app to hit $10 billion in consumer spending, all for short-form video.

Splintering

Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and changed its name to X, things haven’t quite been the same — latest figures suggest that in the U.S. alone, daily users of the app formerly known as Twitter have fallen by nearly a quarter in the months since becoming a plaything for one of the world’s wealthiest individuals.

Federated competitors like Mastodon and Bluesky have jostled for mindshare among ex-X users, and the mighty Meta has thrown its hat into the ring with Threads. But this disaggregation has left millions jumping half-heartedly between myriad different social networks, not quite sure where they should be hanging out.

TikTok can be likened to a next-gen version of Twitter, replete with short-form content, influencers, hashtags and trending topics — an obvious place to jump in some regards, but it’s simply too alien for many of those that grew up on Twitter.

Like just about every successful social network, Twitter grew organically — a combination of the right people, at the right time, with the right backers and the right technology to make it a scalable product in the hands of millions. It’s not possible to lift-and-shift that community onto a new platform at the drop of a hat, and the audience splintering we’ve seen in the aftermath was inevitable.

Twitter-sized hole

This is where LinkedIn is filling a giant hole in many people’s lives. Sure, we’ve all mocked the “professional social network” through the years and scoffed at the self-aggrandizing hustle culture that permeates the billion-plus community, but we’ve all got LinkedIn accounts and we’ve all turned to it at various times when we needed to, like when we’re looking for a new job or trying to network. And now it is serving as the obvious fallback as the bird app flounders.

This all takes us back to LinkedIn’s latest efforts to move with the times. Microsoft doled out north of $26 billion for LinkedIn seven years ago, and it has largely been quiet about its performance in the years since — however, it has been making sounds about its growth rate of late. It revealed that LinkedIn made $15 billion for its 2023 fiscal year, with almost half of that coming from corporate recruitment software. And a few weeks back, LinkedIn said that premium subscriptions brought in $1.7 billion last year (the kinds of numbers that Musk can only dream of over at X).

The notion that LinkedIn has been something of a salvation for Twitter-ditchers is nothing new, but we’re starting to see LinkedIn jump on its latent potential as something more than what most people think it is. Obviously LinkedIn can’t shake off its “business” shackles completely, and you shouldn’t expect to see Taylor Swift or Ronaldo promoting themselves on there any time soon (fingers crossed), but it’s clear that LinkedIn wants to ditch its “stuffy social network for jobseekers” reputation.

This isn’t to say that LinkedIn will see a surge of Gen Zers looking for a dose of thought-leadership delivered via pithy 10-second skits. And LinkedIn shouldn’t try to be Twitter or TikTok — it’s aimed at an entirely different audience. But it can certainly borrow some of their special sauce and appeal to a broader demographic.

As other social networks abandon news, and X no longer the force it once was for keeping on top of global events, LinkedIn was already capitalizing on this sea-change with more investment. And now with games and short-form videos in the mix, LinkedIn wants even more of the action.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

As Microsoft unbundles Teams, it might not have the impact on Slack you think | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 8:55 AM0


One of the primary reasons that Slack joined forces with Salesforce in 2021 in a $28 billion deal was to give the communications company the clout to compete with Microsoft. For years, company co-founder Stewart Butterfield railed against Microsoft bundling Teams with Office 365, calling it anticompetitive and saying at one point that Microsoft was “unhealthily obsessed with killing Slack.”

The company went so far as to file a complaint against Microsoft with the European Union in 2020.

This morning, Microsoft announced it was finally unbundling Teams from Office 365 in the future, although current customers could continue to use the bundled license.

Butterfield stepped down from Slack at the end of 2022, but he seemed less concerned about Microsoft after he became part of the CRM giant, telling TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos in 2021 that Teams seemed to be more focused on meeting software like Zoom than Slack, and he wasn’t aware of the status of the complaint his company filed before becoming part of Salesforce.

Salesforce, for its part, didn’t have any comment on the unbundling announcement, but Microsoft’s bundling strategy seems to have worked quite well, with the company reporting it has over 320 million users worldwide. Compare that with Slack, which has 32 million users or 10% of Microsoft’s total. It’s hard to know what exactly that means given the differences in how the two companies count their users, but it’s clear that Microsoft has opened up a significant lead.

Maybe Butterfield was right, but it’s probably too late to matter. “While Microsoft is unbundling Teams simply to avoid an antitrust mess, it’s good for Salesforce/Slack for sure, but in many ways it may be a Pyrrhic victory,” Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder and principal analyst at Deep Analysis, told TechCrunch. The market has matured to the point that many larger firms have made their choice, and since swapping out solutions isn’t a trivial matter, unbundling Teams is unlikely to have an appreciable impact on market share.

Microsoft’s announcement seemingly allows them to have their cake and eat it too, keeping their existing customers under the existing Office 365 bundling agreement, while charging future customers for using the product, and presumably giving the company an argument with regulators that they’ve unbundled Teams and are not in violation of any anticompetition rules.

In fact, Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, says that this could be the first occurrence where an anticompetitive regulation helps the vendor’s business. “Microsoft has simply sold Teams to enough companies with its existing Office accounts and now no longer needs the energy and power of the enterprise license agreement,” Mueller said.

What’s more, rather than aiding Slack, he sees this as helping Microsoft to get Teams into more accounts where companies weren’t buying Office 365 licenses. Redmond can now sell standalone Teams licenses into non-Microsoft shops much more easily, all while building goodwill with regulators, and still sticking it to Slack in the stand-alone market battle.

That is probably not the outcome that Butterfield envisioned when he started complaining about Microsoft all those years ago, but the regulatory outcome doesn’t always come out in the way you expect, especially when the market shifts so dramatically in the intervening years — or Microsoft’s bundling strategy simply worked.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

The market is forcing cloud vendors to relax data egress fees | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 5:43 AM0


In recent months, the big three cloud vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — have relaxed their egress fees, which are a tax of sorts that the cloud companies charge customers to move their data to another vendor. It’s a way to keep existing customers in the fold, but it’s kind of a ham-handed way to do it, and doesn’t exactly foster goodwill.

As a number of factors come into play, like the reality of a multi-cloud world, a stricter regulatory environment and consumer backlash, these companies are beginning to see the error in their ways by easing these fees, albeit with lots of caveats and a bit of friction involved. For example, there are limits to the kind of data you can move, and each requires you to contact the vendor and open a request to get your own data out of the cloud. But it’s a start at least.

This change of heart is really an acknowledgement of changing market dynamics, says John Dinsdale, chief analyst and managing director at Synergy Research, a firm that tracks the cloud infrastructure market. “I think this is a natural progression of the market. As true competition heats up, it would do cloud providers no good to be seen as being overly protectionist,” Dinsdale told TechCrunch.

“Giving customers what they want is just the right business strategy. In the IT world of the last few years, legacy companies that have tried to hang on to the old ways of doing things have not done well,” he said.

Google says it’ll stop charging fees to transfer data out of Google Cloud

It’s also clear that we are moving into a multi-cloud world where it’s more important than ever to remove friction around moving data, says Jake Graham, CEO and co-founder at Bobsled, a startup that helps customers move data between clouds. His role puts him on the front lines of this issue.

“In the original cloud world, the three major cloud vendors were really fighting to try to build what felt like walled gardens, and as long as you built on top of them, everything was great. But going across them was really challenging,” Graham said. “They’re starting to get significant pushback from their enterprise customers, who are saying that there is no world in which a global enterprise is not using multiple platforms.” He says that charging these fees is putting up a significant barrier to moving data, making it difficult to share with customers, and even within divisions inside the same company.

Rudina Seseri, founder and managing partner at Glasswing Ventures, says the shift is partly due to regulatory pressure, but that isn’t the only reason. “At a high level, this emergence of regulation is a pretty simple explanation for the sudden change in behavior,” she said. “However, I think it is also worth pointing out the optics of preemptively making such a language switch, and how Google has used it as a marketing tool against Azure. If these companies see the demise of egress fees as an inevitability, then Google certainly has first-mover advantage towards painting itself as the ‘less restrictive’ cloud and attracting early-stage customers,” she said.

AWS follows Google in announcing unrestricted free data transfers to other cloud providers

“Metaphorically, the market dynamic is moving away from the stick and back towards the carrot. Cloud customers looking to switch providers will need to be retained through innovative and accessible features now that the punishment of egress fees is being phased out,” Seseri said.

David Linthicum, a longtime cloud consultant, says that while these recent announcements are a pleasant PR move, he warns folks to review their bills carefully because egress fees aren’t the only problem. “This is a nice surprise, but it’s not necessarily consequential. Customers have to consider the costs holistically,” Linthicum told TechCrunch. “In other words, what are we paying for the services we’re leveraging? What are we paying for the networking fees, the egress fees, all the other hidden fees that come along with what people call junk fees that come from the cloud vendors?”

But this may not affect startups as much as larger enterprise customers. “There are more moving parts in a cloud ecosystem than just storage, such as services required for scaling and security, and the largest companies have built tight infrastructures that can be onerous to unwind,” Seseri said. “The experience of startups, however, will certainly improve as providers now must lean further into innovative features and improved customer satisfaction to win long-term loyalty.”

After AWS and Google, Microsoft says it’s removing Azure ‘egress’ data transfer fees — but with caveats

Graham, whose primary business is helping move data, sees his whole business model affected by these fees. He says the recent changes are a small but important step, but he also sees a future where it’s increasingly difficult to determine what is an egress fee and what’s not, which could lead to the ultimate demise of these fees.

That’s because migrations take a long time. It’s not a clean break like, “I was in AWS and now I’m GCP.” It’s a lengthy process over years where data sources that need to communicate are in both clouds for a period of time. At the same time, he says the original cloud vendor is working hard to get the customer to change their minds and come back, and it’s an impossible balancing act for these companies.

“You’re just going to have this battle between the team that is associated with winning back the customer, trying to make the customer happy, and another group that says, wait a second, we already lost this customer. We should be charging them everything. Why are we giving them favorable treatment?”

As data becomes increasingly valuable in the age of AI, being able to move data and put it to work is growing in importance for everyone. Cloud vendors are going to be a lot better off getting in front of this trend instead of throwing up roadblocks to make it more difficult to move data around. Perhaps this is just the start of something much bigger.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Why AWS, Google and Oracle are backing the Valkey Redis fork | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 4:36 AM0


The Linux Foundation last week announced that it will host Valkey, a fork of the Redis in-memory data store. Valkey is backed by Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson and Snap.

AWS and Google Cloud rarely back an open source fork together. Yet, when Redis Labs switched Redis away from the permissive three-clause BSD license on March 20 and adopted the more restrictive Server Side Public License (SSPL), a fork was always one of the most likely outcomes. At the time of the license change, Redis Labs CEO Rowan Trollope said he “wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon sponsors a fork,” as the new license requires commercial agreements to offer Redis-as-a-service, making it incompatible with the standard definition of “open source.”

It’s worth taking a few steps back to look at how we got to this point. Redis, after all, is among the most popular data stores and at the core of many large commercial and open source deployments.

A brief history of Redis

Throughout its lifetime, Redis has actually seen a few licensing disputes. Redis founder Salvatore Sanfilippo launched the project in 2009 under the BSD license, partly because he wanted to be able to create a commercial fork at some point and also because “the BSD [license] allows for many branches to compete, with different licensing and development ideas,” he said in a recent Hacker News comment.

After Redis quickly gained popularity, Garantia became the first major Redis service provider. Garantia rebranded to RedisDB in 2013, and Sanfilippo and the community pushed back. After some time, Garantia eventually changed its name to Redis Labs and then, in 2021, to Redis.

Sanfilippo joined Redis Labs in 2015 and later transferred his IP to Redis Labs/Redis, before stepping down from the company in 2020. That was only a couple of years after Redis changed how it licenses its Redis Modules, which include visualization tools, a client SDK and more. For those modules, Redis first went with the Apache License with the added Commons Clause that restricts others from selling and hosting these modules. At the time, Redis said that despite this change for the modules, “the license for open-source Redis was never changed. It is BSD and will always remain BSD.” That commitment lasted until a few weeks ago.

Redis’ Trollope reiterated in a statement what he told me when he first announced these changes, emphasizing how the large cloud vendors profited from the open source version and are free to enter a commercial agreement with Redis.

“The major cloud service providers have all benefited commercially from the Redis open-source project so it’s not surprising that they are launching a fork within a foundation,” he wrote. “Our licensing change opened the door for CSPs to establish fair licensing agreements with Redis Inc. Microsoft has already come to an agreement, and we’re happy and open to creating similar relationships with AWS and GCP. We remain focused on our role as stewards of the Redis project, and our mission of investing in the Redis source available product, the ecosystem, the developer experience, and serving our customers. Innovation has been and always will be the differentiating factor between the success of Redis and any alternative solution.”

Cloud vendors backed Valkey

The current reality, however, is that the large cloud vendors, with the notable exception of Microsoft, quickly rallied behind Valkey. This fork originated at AWS, where longtime Redis maintainer Madelyn Olson initially started the project in her own GitHub account. Olson told me that when the news broke, a lot of the current Redis maintainers quickly decided that it was time to move on. “When the news broke, everyone was just like, ‘Well, we’re not going to go contribute to this new license,’ and so as soon as I talked to everyone, ‘Hey, I have this fork — we’re trying to keep the old group together,’” she said, “pretty much everyone was like, ‘yeah, I’m immediately on board.”

The original Redis private channel included five maintainers: three from Redis, Olson and Alibaba’s  Zhao Zhao, as well as a small group of committers who also immediately signed on to what is now Valkey. The maintainers from Redis unsurprisingly did not sign on, but as David Nalley, AWS’s director for open source strategy and marketing, told me, the Valkey community would welcome them with open arms.

Olson noted that she always knew that this change was a possibility and well within the rights of the BSD license. “I’m more just disappointed than anything else. [Redis] had been a good steward in the past, and I think the community is kind of disappointed in the change.”

Nalley noted that “from an AWS perspective, it probably would not have been the choice that we wanted to see out of Redis Inc.” But he also acknowledged that Redis is well within its rights to make this change. When asked whether AWS had considered buying a license from Redis, he gave a diplomatic answer and noted that AWS “considered a lot of things” and that nothing was off the table in the team’s decision making.

“It’s certainly their prerogative to make such a decision,” he said. “While we have, as a result, made some other decisions about where we’re going to focus our energy and our time, Redis remains an important partner and customer, and we share a large number of customers between us. And so we hope they are successful. But from an open source perspective, we’re now invested in ensuring the success of Valkey.”

It’s not often that a fork comes together this quickly and is able to gather the support of this many companies under the auspice of the Linux Foundation (LF). That’s something that previous Redis forks like KeyDB didn’t have going for them. But as it turns out, some of this was also fortuitous timing. Redis’s announcement came right in the middle of the European version of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s KubeCon conference, which was held in Paris this year. There, Nalley met up with the LF’s executive director, Jim Zemlin.

“It ruined KubeCon for me, because suddenly, I ended up in a lot of conversations about how we respond,” he said. “[Zemlin] had some concerns and volunteered the Linux Foundation as a potential home. So we went through the process of introducing Madelyn [Olson] and the rest of the maintainers to the Linux Foundation, just to see if they thought that it was going to be a compatible move.”

What’s next?

The Valkey team is working on getting a compatibility release out that provides current Redis users with a transition path. The community is also working on an improved shared clustering system, improved multi-threaded performance and more.

With all of this, it’s not likely that Redis and Valkey will stay aligned in their capabilities for long, and Valkey may not remain a drop-in Redis replacement in the long run. One area Redis (the company) is investing in is moving beyond in-memory to also using flash storage, with RAM as a large, high-performance cache. That’s why Redis recently acquired Speedb. Olson noted that there are no concrete plans for similar capabilities in Valkey yet, but didn’t rule it out either.

“There is a lot of excitement right now,” Olson said. “I think previously we’ve been a little technologically conservative and trying to make sure we don’t break stuff. Whereas now, I think there’s a lot of interest in building a lot of new things. We still want to make sure we don’t break things but there’s a lot more interest in updating technologies and trying to make everything faster, more performant, more memory dense. […] I think that’s sort of what happens when a changing of the guard happens because a bunch of previous maintainers are now basically no longer there.”

Redis switches licenses, acquires Speedb to go beyond its core in-memory database


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Back
WhatsApp
Messenger
Viber