Valkey, heralded as a better alternative to Redis, has taken the industry by storm. Reinforcing its superiority, a rapidly growing ecosystem is being built around it.

Valkey is an open-source in-memory NoSQL data store that was forked from Redis earlier this year when Redis changed its licensing terms.

It is already showing greater potential than Redis. Why?

Because Valkey is tweaked for performance:

• Asynchronous I/O Threading: Enables parallel processing of commands and I/O operations, maximizing throughput and minimizing bottlenecks.
  
  
• Intelligent Core Utilization: Distributes I/O tasks across multiple cores based on realtime usage, reducing idle time and improving energy efficiency.
  
  
• Command Batching: Optimizes memory access patterns by prefetching frequently accessed data to minimize CPU cache misses, reducing memory accesses required for dictionary operations.

It takes care of replication:

• By introducing a dual-channel replication scheme, allowing the RDB and the replica backlog to be transferred simultaneously, accelerating synchronization.

It is observable:

• It introduces a comprehensive per-slot metrics infrastructure, providing detailed visibility into the performance and resource usage of individual slots. This granular data helps inform decisions about resource allocation, load balancing, and performance optimization.

It is efficient by storing more data but with a reduced memory overhead.

And finally it is true open source, released under the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) three-clause license. In fact, it was Redis changing its license that was the the pain point that prompted the Linux Foundation to kick off the Valkey project. That is, Redis version 7. 4 onwards will be dual-licensed under the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and Server Side Public License (SSPLv1) which both collide with the true nature open source software. Therefore Valkey began life as the fork of Redis, with the added improvements of course that render it a high-performance key-value data store that supports a variety of workloads such as caching, session stores, leaderboards, and message queues.

Hence, it didn't take long for vendors to add peripheral support for Valkey. Amazon recently announced Valkey GLIDE, an open source client library that supports all Valkey commands. It is implemented using a core driver framework, written in Rust, but comes multi-with language specific extensions. In this release, Valkey GLIDE is available for Python, Java and Node. js. Support for GO is actively under development, with plans to include more programming languages in the future.

Then yet another giant, Google, launched Memorystore for Valkey, a fully managed Valkey Cluster service for Google Cloud. Memorystore for Valkey distributes (or "shards") your data across primary nodes and replicates your data across optional replica nodes to ensure high availability. The horizontally scalable architecture provides better performance over vertically scalable architecture because Valkey performance is better on many smaller nodes instead of fewer larger nodes. Now you can easily create a fully-managed Valkey Cluster from the console or gcloud and scale in or out to meet the demands of their workloads.

And Oracle is also working on integrating Valkey support into its OCI Cache service.

Valkey's latest version is Valkey 8. 0. 1 which can be downloaded from its GitHub repo and be compiled and used on Linux, OSX, OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD. Other options are installing the binaries, or deploying the containers or just waiting for the package managers to pick up the latest version in the coming days.

More Information

Valkey 8.0.1

Valkey GA 

Related Articles

Redis Changes License, Rival Fork Launched  

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