The Linux Foundation Announces General Availability of Valkey 8.1

Valkey 8.1 Release Provides Enhanced Performance and Observability Improvements.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, London, UK – April 2, 2025 – Today, the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced the general availability of Valkey 8.1, marking a major milestone in the advancement of open source in-memory data stores. This latest release empowers enterprises to optimize data management at scale, while reducing operational overhead in finance and engineering resources.

As digital transformation accelerates, enterprises require more efficient and cost-effective data solutions. By upgrading to Valkey 8.1, organizations can reduce memory usage, increase processing speed, and cut infrastructure costs, thus maximizing performance without increasing overhead costs.

"Valkey’s rapid modernization highlights the demand for fast, reliable, and secure data processing and the strength that comes from open source collaboration,” said Madelyn Olson, Co-Maintainer of Valkey. “With the release of Valkey 8.1, we’re seeing significantly better memory efficiency, deeper observability, and a lot of exciting functionality delivered through our module interface. This innovation reinforces Valkey’s position as a future-proof, innovative data store.” 

For modern businesses relying on real-time data processing, Valkey 8.1 helps reduce costs with a new memory-efficient dictionary implementation, resulting in up to 20% memory footprint reductions for common key/value workloads. The release also features: 

• Up to 20% better performance for encryption in transit workloads that use I/O threading
• Up to 90% reduction in P100 request latency when using active memory defragmentation
• A new command log that provides insights into commands that consume significant network bandwidth

With an emphasis on deployment flexibility, Valkey is also rolling out its first set of modules, a pivotal step in extending the platform’s options for data store customization. Contributed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, these modules will enable developers to tailor data storage capabilities to evolving business needs. Available for early exploration today, these modules will be bundled in an official release later this year,  allowing developers to further customize their experience with Valkey.

The first three modules available for early exploration include:

• Search Module – A high-performance vector similarity search engine, contributed by Google, designed for AI-driven workloads demanding single-digit millisecond latency and high QPS. Capable of handling billions of vectors with demonstrated recall over 99%. Currently in beta with expected General Availability at the end of Q2.

• JSON Module – Native support for the JSON data type, contributed by AWS, simplifying document-based storage and retrieval by allowing updating and retrieving a subset of the JSON data without having to process it on the client.
• Probabilistic Bloom Filter Module – Efficient large-scale membership testing, contributed by AWS, reducing memory usage by over 90% for many applications including fraud detection and advertising.

The launch of Valkey 8.1 coincides with the project’s one-year anniversary, marking a moment of accelerated growth and adoption within the cloud-native ecosystem, with over 150 unique contributors to the core. To celebrate, the Valkey project will host a Valkey birthday event at the Percona booth on the showroom floor of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in London, April 1-4, 2025, featuring Valkey-themed cupcakes and networking opportunities for the expanding open source community.

To upgrade to Valkey 8.1, explore its performance enhancements, and experiment with the first set of modules, visit www.valkey.io.

Supporting Quotes

“With the launch of 8.1, the Valkey community continues to innovate at a rapid clip. The latest enhancements make Valkey even faster, more performant, and more cost effective, while the new modules greatly increase the flexibility of Valkey for a range of evolving workloads. We are pleased to contribute some of the top requested features such as JSON and Bloom Filters to the Valkey 8.1 release and collaborate with other contributors from a wide-range of companies on many other innovations in Valkey. Together we create a thriving, vibrant community that delivers software everyone can benefit from.”
– Itay Maoz, Director for AWS In-Memory Databases

"Valkey 8.1 provides a strong foundation for machine learning, real-time data processing, and more generally for the future of data-driven innovation. Its modular extensibility aligns perfectly with our vision for flexible and open source infrastructure. We’re excited to support Valkey’s continued growth. Enterprises require maintained and adaptable data solutions, and Canonical is proud to collaborate with the Valkey community to deliver exactly that."
– Cédric Gégout, VP of Products at Canonical

“I'm pleased to see Valkey evolving with great velocity during this first year. Many contributors have been part of the 8.1 release. Performance is a key focus for Valkey, and in this release I have contributed to improving memory efficiency by implementing a new hash table that optimizes key-value lookups.”
– Viktor Söderqvist, Co-Maintainter of Valkey, Senior Open Source Developer, Ericsson Software Technology, Part of Ericsson

"Valkey 8.1 is a testament to the power of open-source innovation, delivering great efficiency, scalability, and cost savings for modern enterprises. With groundbreaking improvements in performance, observability, and modular extensibility, this release is a game-changer for data-driven organizations looking to future-proof their infrastructure. I’m especially excited to see how the new Vector Similarity Search module will unlock new possibilities for AI-driven applications, enabling faster, more efficient machine learning workloads that can push the boundaries of what’s possible. Combined with the JSON module, these new capabilities can take Valkey beyond caching to deliver a lightning-fast in-memory document database."
– Dmitry Polyakovsky, OCI Cache Tech Lead, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

"Valkey will soon introduce a new vector similarity search module, a significant advancement for AI-driven applications. The 8.1 release also debuts the first set of official extension modules, providing a consistent and seamless user experience beyond core Valkey capabilities. Combined with key engine enhancements, Valkey 8.1 delivers a robust, powerful, and versatile platform for modern data workloads."
– Ping Xie, Co-Maintainter of Valkey, Google Cloud

"Valkey, It’s been a year since it was born. During this year, we can see its making progress day by day, and week by week. We can also see more and more contributors and companies join the Vakey family. Now ,Valkey 8.1 is out, which uses less memory, and it includes many new features and provides better performance and reliability. From AI-driven insights to real-time analytics, the Vector Similarity Search and native support for JSON is integrated with Valkey seamlessly. With these modules, Valkey could work as a better candidate for AI/ML applications which need faster responses."
– Wen Hui, Co-Maintainter of Valkey, Senior Software Engineer, Huawei Cloud

"Over the past year since it was formed, Valkey has developed from a fork to being a project in its own right. The addition of Vector Similarity Search and native support for JSON make Valkey effective for supporting large scale modern database tasks. We are pleased to contribute around extending programmability support in Valkey with a new module API to support plugins for different scripting engines, which will allow users to write scripts using different programming languages and runtimes. This will make it easier for developers to work with Valkey in their application deployments."
– Vadim Tkachenko, Technology Fellow and Co-Founder, Percona 

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