Valkey - Open Source Redis Fork

Valkey is a Redis fork supported by the Linux Foundation. It is free and open source.

Why Valkey?

Redis was doing good on its own. But there occurred a license change from open source BSD licence to source available licence.

According to the Redis blog

Quote

First, we openly acknowledge that this change means Redis is no longer open source under the OSI definition.

According to reports, Redis is the 6 th most popular database in the world based on the number of users. Various news sources say the Redis team is not happy about Valkey and called it an excuse by cloud providers to pay a fee. Cloud providers who use Redis as a part of commercial package earns money and gives back nothing to Redis (opinion).

Redis will go dual licenced as of v7.4 and will keep the old versions under open source licence.

Valkey got wide support from players AWS, GCP and Oracle.

You can read more about the same in the Linux Foundation blog post

For the moment, we can say that Valkey is a well funded alternative to Redis.

Azure is big, really big. They compete with AWS for the US government orders.

It doesn't matter though. There is fork if you need an option. If you are comfortable paying for a commercial version that option is also available. That is a win win for all.

Here is the GitHub repo

GitHub - valkey-io/valkey: A new project to resume development on the formerly open-source Redis project. We're calling it Valkey, since it's a twist on the key-value datastore.

A new project to resume development on the formerly open-source Redis project. We're calling it Valkey, since it's a twist on the key-value datastore. -…

github.com

Valkey is now included in Ubuntu

https://ubuntu.com/blog/valkey-ubuntu

Currently supported versions are Ubuntu 24.04 Noble Numbay LTS and Ubuntu 24.10 Oracular Oriole