In 2024, the Redis company switched the licensing for the core code repository from the BSD license to dual SSPL and proprietary licensing. This move prompted a large portion of the user and developer community, including contributors from Alibaba Group, Amazon, Ericsson, Google, Huawei, and Tencent, to fork the code of Redis 7.2.4 as a project of the Linux Foundation under the new name Valkey. The fork retained the BSD license, ensuring the software would remain open source forever. By keeping the original permissive terms, Valkey avoided the legal complexities that accompanied the upstream change, allowing developers to integrate the database into their products without fear of restrictive clauses or compliance audits.
Performance and Architecture
Valkey 8.0, released six months after the fork, featured improved threading and significantly improved performance. On October 21, 2025, the Linux Foundation announced the general availability of Valkey 9.0, which introduced atomic slot migration, hash field expiration, and support for multiple databases in cluster mode. These updates enabled clusters of up to 2,000 nodes and throughput exceeding 1 billion requests per second. A few 10MB requests per second wrecked the tail latency of a 100K req/s workload on Valkey 8.1, but reply copy avoidance in Valkey 9.0 cuts p99.9 from 26.2ms to 3.10ms.
The latest stable release is Valkey 9.1.3, dated October 26, 2026. Version 9.1 focused on compute efficiency and modularity, introducing Valkey Admin, an open-source visual cluster management tool. The project supports a wide range of native structures and an extensible plugin system for adding new data structures and access patterns. It runs on Linux, macOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD, supporting both big endian and little endian architectures. For compatibility with legacy systems, the installation process creates symlinks from the Redis names to the Valkey binaries.
| Version | Latest Release | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Valkey 9.1 | 9.1.3 | October 26, 2026 |
| Valkey 9.0 | 9.0.7 | October 27, 2026 |
| Valkey 8.1 | 8.1.11 | October 26, 2026 |
| Valkey 8.0 | 8.0.12 | October 26, 2026 |
Ecosystem Adoption
Major cloud providers have fully embraced the fork. Amazon ElastiCache is a fully managed, Valkey-compatible service delivering real-time, cost-optimized performance. Google Cloud Memorystore provides sub-millisecond data access and high availability for Valkey workloads. Heroku Key-Value Store and DigitalOcean Managed Caching for Valkey also offer fully managed, high-performance in-memory key-value datastores. Percona provides operational support and hands-on assistance for complex projects, while BetterDB offers the first monitoring platform built specifically for Valkey.
The ecosystem includes client libraries for Python, Java, Go, Node.js, PHP, C#, Ruby, and more. Freshworks authored valkey-glide-ruby, the official Ruby client for Valkey GLIDE, and contributed to the underlying GLIDE Rust core. The project is backed by the Linux Foundation, with participants dedicated to continuously strengthening the long-term health and viability of the codebase. Since its inception, Valkey has enjoyed steady adoption, demonstrating the industry’s desire for an open, community-driven database solution.
Does the shift to dual licensing at Redis Ltd. permanently fracture the NoSQL landscape, or will the two projects eventually converge? The current trajectory suggests a permanent split, with Valkey gaining ground through aggressive feature development and broad enterprise support. Developers should note that while Valkey remains compatible with legacy Redis OSS, the divergence in features like Cluster V2 and active-active replication means new applications must choose their path carefully.
