Salvatore Sanfilippo
More info
- Born
- Known for
- Created Redis
- Nationality
- Italian
Wrote Redis to fix a performance problem in his own startup — and thereby gave the web its default cache.
Sanfilippo, known as antirez, needed something faster for real-time analytics in 2009 than his MySQL setup could manage. The result was an in-memory database that, unlike memcached, stored real data structures — lists, sets, sorted sets — which made it useful for queues and leaderboards, not just key-value lookups.
He maintained the project for a decade with a stated position that simplicity and readable code outweigh breadth of features, and stepped down in 2020. The 2024 licence change, when Redis Ltd. abandoned the BSD licence, led to the Valkey fork under the Linux Foundation.