Valkey 8 sets a new bar for open-source in-memory NoSQL data storage

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Vienna, Austria: Valkey, the Redis fork, is kicking rump and taking names. At Open Source Summit Europe, the Linux Foundation announced the release of Valkey 8.0, a giant step forward to the open-source in-memory NoSQL data store. This release focuses on enhancing performance, reliability, and observability, marking a major milestone for the project initially forked from Redis due to licensing changes.

While Valkey 8.0 is fully compatible with Redis OSS 7.2.4, it also includes features that Redis users have been waiting for for years. As Madelyn Olson, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) principal engineer, former longtime Redis maintainer, and one of the co-launchers of Valkey, said earlier this year, "The previous Redis core team was actually pretty technically conservative." This new crew is not conservative in the least, and the results are impressive.

Valkey 8.0's updates include:

• Performance Enhancements: Intelligent multi-core utilization and asynchronous I/O threading boost throughput to 1.2 million requests per second, tripling the performance of previous versions. By switching from Redis's archaic single-thread event loop threading model to a sophisticated, I/O operations multithreaded approach, Valkey has vastly increased its speed.

• Improved Scalability and Reliability: The update introduces dual-channel replication and enhanced cluster scaling.

• Advanced Observability: Comprehensive metrics for performance monitoring, including pubsub clients and event loop latency, are now available.

• Memory Efficiency: Optimized key storage reduces memory overhead by up to 10%.

Automatic Failover: Automatic failover ensures that if a primary server or shard fails, a backup can take over immediately, reducing downtime and maintaining service availability.

Users and programmers alike were impressed by the new release. A software engineer, not connected with Valkey, told me, "This is what Redis should have been doing all along."  As Dirk Hohndel, a Linux kernel developer and long-time open-source leader, said at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2024 Summit China a few weeks  ago, on his small Valkey-powered aircraft tracking system, “I see roughly a threefold improvement in performance, and I stream a lot of data, 60 million data points a day.”

He wasn't the only one who liked what he saw. The release has garnered support from major tech companies like AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle, indicating strong industry backing for this open-source initiative.

Indeed, while Valkey may not be the most successful fork of all time, it's certainly the fastest to move from a dead stop to greatly improved performance and mass-market acceptance. 

Just look at the record. In March, Redis announced that it was dumping the open source BSD 3-clause license for its Redis in-memory key-value database for a “source-available” Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and Server Side Public License (SSPLv1). That made both developers and users unhappy. 

So, as open-source people do, community members immediately forked the code into Valkey with the support of the Linux Foundation. Redis might have been wiser not to announce this move during KubeCon Europe 2024 in Paris, where literally all the top Redis developers were meeting with their cloud-native computing buddies. 

In days, with the help of the Linux Foundation, they set up their own foundation, Valkey Community Foundation. In weeks, they launched the first release of Valkey. Michael Dolan, the Linux Foundation's SVP and GM of Projects, and I agreed. We'd never seen a fork project move so quickly, and between us, we've seen a ton of projects. 

Looking ahead, the future is bright for Valkey. As for Redis, I foresee nothing but storm clouds ahead.  

Other noteworthy Linux and open-source stories:

• Wind River Unveils Linux Distro for AI and Critical Workloads

• 20 years later, real-time Linux makes it to the kernel - really

• Linus Torvalds muses about maintainer gray hairs and the next 'King of Linux'

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