Redis is No Longer Fully Open Source – Meet Valkey, the True Alternative! 🚀🔥

Narendra Vardi -

Redis is a key-value database used by many companies worldwide. Although it was created for caching, it has been adopted for multiple use cases, such as distributed locking, rate limiting, and messaging queues to name a few.

Due to this, Redis is used in the majority of the services across companies. It's one of the key components of the system. This means the majority of the cloud providers offer Redis as a service. AWS for example provides it in the form of Elasticache.

Recently the Redis license has been changed from BSD-3-Clause license to RSAL . RSAL restricts cloud providers from offering Redis as a managed service without a commercial agreement with Redis Inc.

To preserve an open-source alternative, the community, led by the Linux Foundation, forked Redis before the license change.

Origin of Valkey

  • Valkey was forked from Redis OSS 7.2.4.
  • Maintains the BSD-3-Clause license.
  • Created to provide a fully open-source alternative to Redis after Redis Inc. switched to RSAL.
  • Redis 7.2.5+ switched to RSAL (Redis Source Available License).

Valkey 7.2

Since Valkey is forked from 7.2.4, its version is called Valkey 7.2 (Its versioning doesn't start with 1 or 2)

💡
Redis OSS refers to Redis Open Source Software, which means the Redis version is <= 7.2.4

Valkey 8.0

Valkey 8 (the next version of 7.2) is expected to have improved performance over Redis OSS as it introduces a new I/O threading architecture, which improves the parallelism of the system and more efficiently executes commands.

Looking at the gains of using Valkey 8.0, it might be tempting to jump and start using Valkey 8.0. Careful! It's a major change. Redis OSS was always a single-threaded application, now it's becoming parallel, which means there could be potential bugs and issues. Ensure to test it out in non-production environments before you adopt it for your production use case.

Summary

If you ask me the difference between Valkey 7.2 and Redis 7.2.4, I would say nothing. It’s just the name. But their futures diverge. Valkey is essentially Redis OSS in a different universe—Multiverse is so real in Software!