Absolutely not. First of all, you can always use any software under AGPL as released without any limitation.
Secondly, if you were to make changes and release them you can still run it any way you want.
Thirdly, if you are making changes for internal use, and for some reasons your really want to keep them secret, you can STILL run the database to your heart's contents as long as you don't provide it as a service to the public.
AGPL is much more permissive than people think. It's just providing a degree of protection to developers and and users from patent trolls and other uncooperative entities.
Here [A]GPL is Schrödinger's license. At the same time people complain that it's too restrictive and not restrictive enough.
If you want to completely prohibit any SaaS usage closed source is the only option, like BSL. And I'll stay away from your software.
From their FAQ:
> The market is quickly moving to consume most software as a service. This is a time of incredible opportunity for open source projects, with the potential to foster a new wave of great open source server side software. The reality, however, is that once an open source project becomes interesting, it is too easy for large cloud vendors to capture all the value but contribute nothing back to the community.
HN discussion from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18229452
FAQ: https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license...
Today, MongoDB is an AWS partner: https://aws.amazon.com/quickstart/architecture/mongodb/
The most recent notable example of open-source software going closed because of Amazon specifically is Elasticsearch, which switched from Apache to SSPL. The announcement blog post was titled "Amazon: NOT OK - why we had to change Elastic licensing".
HN discussion from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25833781
There really aren't that many popular AGPL server software to start with though, so it's an unfairly biased question.
So, if this were AGPL and I have an closed webservice that uses this, it is in the clear.
The performance improvements are not worth the legal/compliance overhead of adding non-FOSS to my stack. Much less so if the performance improvements are due just to some optimization choice in the underlying system. In the next 5 years, it will be easier to have Redis adding the io_ring optimizations than for this new project to become uniquely better.
I have a SaaS [0], my own (AGPL, by the way) open source project [1] and also work have the occasional contract job. It's much easier to say "just use Redis because it is FOSS and it gets the job done" across the board then to try to special-case the tools based on licensing requirements.
[1]: https://hub20.io