Fork yeah: Valkey 9 sharpens edge against Redis

Open source database adds multi-tenant clustering, safer shutdowns, and eyes life beyond caching

Open source key-value database Valkey is set for its ninth iteration next month, promising improved resource optimization and availability.

Valkey was forked from Redis in April last year after the popular in-memory database – often used as a cache – moved to a less permissive license. Shifting Redis to a dual-licensed Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and Server Side Public License (SSPLv1) prompted the Linux Foundation to fork the code from Redis 7.2.4, backed by AWS, Google, Snap, Ericsson, Oracle, and others.

Martin Visser, Valkey technical lead at Percona, an open source database consultancy, said a lot of organizations run many different applications using Valkey as a component for caching. The challenge is allowing different applications to run on a single Valkey instance, which Valkey 9 promises to address.

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"Valkey can be a clustered setup where you have multiple shards and so on," Visser said. "In the past, the sharded mode was limited to having a single logical database, which means that you had to have a one-to-one mapping from the application to your Valkey setup, but in 9, what's been done is allow multiple logical databases also in cluster mode, which means from a resource point of view, you can combine many different applications to use the same cluster.

"That's been a much asked-for feature in the community. Instead of having a one-to-one mapping from application to deployment cluster, you can now combine multiple parts of your application. If you think about microservices as well, you may have a different data set for different services. Now you can have one Valkey cluster, and logically divide those into multiple databases."

Valkey 9 also promises unified auto-failover configuration for high availability, regardless of the deployment choices, allowing developers to keep clusters consistent from development to staging to production, and a safe shutdown mode so a shutdown command does not pull the plug on production without a deliberate, confirmed action.

Visser said that the long-term plan for Valkey was to diverge from Redis in that it would become a more consistent and durable general-purpose database, rather than simply a cache.

"This is something that was heavily discussed in the recent contributing summit, and now being put into the plan, opening Valkey up for different use cases. This is a longer-term plan, and I think that will be quite a big differentiator from Redis going forward."

Redis users on older versions of the database will be running out of time to jump to a compatible version of Valkey. The last version of Redis from before the Valkey fork is Enterprise 7.2. Support for that version ends in February 2026. ®