Valkey Community Announces Release Candidate Amid Growing Support for Open Source Data Store

Valkey community welcomes new partners, including Aiven, Alibaba Cloud, Chainguard, Heroku, Huawei, Percona, and Verizon.

SEATTLE, Washington – April 16, 2024 – The Linux Foundation is excited to announce the Valkey 7.2.5-rc1 release candidate, amid growing support for Valkey as an open source alternative to the Redis in-memory, NoSQL data store. Announced in March as a response to a recent license change by Redis Inc, Valkey has experienced tremendous growth and support, including new partners, contributors, and community participants. Valkey will continue development based on Redis OSS 7.2.4 and will keep the project available for use and distribution under the open source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) 3-clause license. 

Since the Redis project was founded in 2009, thousands of open source developers have contributed significantly to its growth and success. To continue improving on this important technology and allow for unfettered distribution of the project, the community created Valkey, an open source high performance key-value store. The community has now unveiled Valkey 7.2.5-rc1, a release candidate for initial compatibility, which will allow existing Redis users to easily migrate to Valkey with no backwards incompatible API changes. The team is also working on an upcoming major release, Valkey 8.0, which will include new features such as more reliable slot migration and memory efficiency improvements. The Valkey 8.0 release is expected to become available by the end of 2024.

Industry participants supporting the Valkey project have expanded to include Aiven, Alibaba Cloud, Chainguard, Heroku, Huawei, Percona, and Verizon, in addition to existing partners Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc. The core group of maintainers and contributors is also expanding, as Valkey encourages contribution in an open and collaborative manner. Together, the Valkey community will focus on making contributions that support the long-term health and viability of the project so that everyone can benefit from it.

At the Linux Foundation, Valkey will follow an open governance model, remaining community-driven and welcoming of all users and contributors. The project has already assembled a technical leadership committee of several former Redis contributors, and hundreds more community members have voiced their intent to support Valkey. To learn more about Valkey, please visit the project on GitHub.

Supporting Quotes

"Aiven is a strong supporter of open source with open governance. We were delighted to hear about the creation of Valkey and we are supporters of this project. We plan to get to work with this technology at the earliest opportunity, and to add it to the Aiven Platform so that our customers can continue to benefit from access to the most popular and widely adopted open source data and AI technology"
– Oskari Saarenmaa, CEO & Co-founder, Aiven.

"For the past seven years, I've made many friends in the Redis community, we all share a deep passion for Redis. And as a core team member, I continuously contributed code to the community, including many key features on our platform — that's what open source is all about. Now, we've started Valkey to keep that work going. We're all about keeping the open source spirit alive, making the community better, and giving users and developers a great experience."
– Zhao Zhao, Former Redis Core Team Member, Co-Maintainter of Valkey, Software Engineer, Alibaba Cloud. 

"I am very happy to witness the establishment of the new Valkey community, and also very happy to see many contributors from the Redis community gathering in Valkey. Alibaba Cloud has been continuously contributing to the Redis project since 2017 and is committed to promoting a better Redis community. Going forward, in an open, sustainable environment like the Linux Foundation, we look forward to providing further support and contributions to the Valkey project, and we look forward to Valkey becoming a vibrant project and thriving."
– Dr. FeiFei Li, President of Database Products Business at Alibaba Cloud, VP of Alibaba Cloud.

“Redis has been one of the most versatile and popular databases available, and I am happy to see the Linux Foundation establish a sustainable community for the future of this foundational technology with Valkey that promotes open source innovation and growth. Chainguard will be adding a Valkey package to Wolfi and Valkey to our Chainguard Images Directory to bring minimal, secure-by-default, and up-to-date options to the community to leverage for their open source projects and applications.”
– Dan Lorenc, CEO and Co-founder of Chainguard.

“Heroku believes in Valkey's mission and purpose, and we're impressed by its community support. With this group of experienced contributors and broad industry backing, Valkey is continuing the open source model that’s been transformative for developers everywhere. We trust that the project will continue to innovate so that developers can keep building critical, data driven applications using their favorite open source key-value data store."
– Gail Frederick, Heroku CTO, Salesforce.

“Since 2019, the Huawei Platform and Service team has contributed significantly to Redis Open Source. I was quite upset when I heard Redis was closed source a few weeks ago. Valkey is a great replacement for Redis that can resume our roadmap for a truly free open source project. This will benefit all members of the community. My team will continuously contribute to Valkey open source, and will work closely with other members of the community to build a truly open source product."
– Paul Chen, Distinguished Engineer & Chief Architect, Huawei Canada.

“I’ve used Redis for over a decade which includes building software applications that leverage Redis and have created several open source libraries for it. I'm thrilled to share my knowledge with the community and enable other developers to enhance Valkey's functionality by simplifying the process of building modules.”
– Dmitry Polyakovsky, consulting member of the technical staff, Oracle.

“At Percona, we believe in the power of open source for creating better software that meets the needs of users, developers, and companies, and that open source supports us all in achieving our goals. Many of our customers already use the Redis database, so the launch of Valkey to preserve unfettered access via a fully open source, community-powered project is a logical and vital outcome of Redis' recent business decision. We plan to provide commercial support for Valkey deployments in the future. We understand the need for profitability and revenue around open source projects to fairly compensate maintainers and contributors for their efforts. Over the past 17 years we have been working in this model, proving its viability without bait-and-switch licensing changes.”
– Ann Schlemmer, CEO at Percona.

“Open source technologies are fundamental to modern IT infrastructure and Verizon is a major user of these technologies. Serving our customers requires continued improvement and innovation so we are delighted to see the Linux Foundation launch the Valkey project, ensuring that unencumbered access and collaboration continue on in memory key value database technology."
– Dirk Hohndel, Senior Director, Open Source Program Office at Verizon.

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