How Valkey Overtook Redis in Two Years?

For fifteen years, Redis was the undisputed default for in-memory caching. Licensed under the permissive BSD license, it quietly powered the session stores, leaderboards, and real-time queues of the modern internet. Half of all web requests, it was said, passed through it in some form. Then, on March 20, 2024, Redis Inc. changed everything — and set in motion one of the fastest and most consequential forks in open-source history.

Starting with version 7.4, Redis switched from BSD to a dual license: RSALv2 and SSPLv1. Neither is recognized as open source by the Open Source Initiative. The practical effect was surgical but devastating: cloud providers — AWS, Google Cloud, Azure — could no longer offer Redis as a managed service without negotiating a commercial agreement with Redis Inc.

The business logic was understandable. Cloud hyperscalers were extracting enormous value from Redis while the project’s maintainers saw little in return. But the execution was blunt. A project that had defined open-source infrastructure for a generation was, overnight, no longer open source. The community’s reaction was swift and unambiguous.

On March 28, 2024 — eight days after the license announcement — the Linux Foundation unveiled Project Valkey. The founding coalition was formidable: AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap. They forked Redis 7.2.4, the last BSD-licensed version, and kept the license BSD. Within weeks, more than fifty companies had joined, including Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, ByteDance, Percona, and Canonical.

This was not the first time a major open-source project had triggered a community fork. HashiCorp changed Terraform to BSL in August 2023, spawning OpenTofu. Elastic changed to SSPL in 2021, producing OpenSearch. But Valkey was faster and larger than any of them. And unlike its predecessors, it was backed from day one by the engineers who had written most of the original code.

• Mar 20, 2024
  Redis license changeBSD → RSALv2 + SSPLv1. No longer considered open source by OSI.
• Mar 28, 2024
  Valkey foundedLinux Foundation announces the fork. AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, Snap join as founding members.
• Late 2024
  Ecosystem expands50+ companies join. 150+ contributors, 1,000+ commits, 13 versions released. Docker pulls exceed 5 million.
• Nov 2024
  ElastiCache Valkey 8.0AWS launches Valkey 8.0 on ElastiCache — the first major managed cloud endorsement of the fork.
• Dec 2024
  Antirez returnsRedis founder Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) rejoins Redis Inc. after six years away.
• Apr 2025
  Linux distros switchArch Linux replaces Redis with Valkey in its official repository. Fedora 41 and openSUSE follow.
• May 1, 2025
  Redis re-open-sourcedRedis 8.0 GA launches with AGPLv3 added as a third license option. Antirez declares: “Redis is open source again.”
• Oct 2025
  Valkey 9.0 releasedHash field TTL, atomic slot migration, multi-database cluster mode. Up to 40% throughput gain for pipelined workloads.
• May 2026
  AWS ElastiCache Valkey 9.0AWS officially launches Valkey 9.0 on ElastiCache with built-in full-text search, hybrid vector search, and 40% higher pipelined throughput.
• May 19, 2026
  Valkey 9.1 releasedFirst stable release of the 9.1 branch, with security fixes and continued performance improvements.

In April 2025, caching service company Momento ran a head-to-head benchmark on AWS c8g.2xlarge (Graviton4) instances with 6 IO threads, comparing Valkey 8.1.1 and Redis 8.0.0. The results were stark, though it should be noted the tests used IRQ core pinning — not a default out-of-the-box configuration.

Independent tests by Percona confirm the trend. Valkey 8.1 achieves approximately 1.2 million operations per second on r6g.large nodes, versus 1.11 million for Redis OSS — an 8% throughput edge in standard configurations. P99 tail latency sits at 1.8ms for Valkey against 2.3ms for Redis OSS on cache.m7g.large under mixed read/write traffic, a 22% improvement. Memory efficiency has also widened: Valkey 8.1’s redesigned hash table drops memory footprint by 20% for typical workloads.

Antirez himself acknowledged on Hacker News that IO threading was first introduced to Redis in 2020, and that Valkey’s performance gains build on that original foundation. The fork did not reinvent the architecture; it accelerated its evolution.

Released in October 2025, Valkey 9.0 introduced three architectural features that the community had long requested. Atomic slot migration fundamentally changed how Valkey moves data between cluster nodes — replacing a key-by-key approach prone to edge-case failures with a true atomic operation, enabling zero-downtime cluster expansion. Hash fields can now carry their own TTL, allowing fine-grained expiration of individual fields within a hash without key sprawl. And cluster mode gained multi-database support, simplifying multi-tenant architectures that previously required complex key-prefix schemes.

AWS’s ElastiCache announcement for Valkey 9.0 in May 2026 framed the throughput improvement as up to 40% higher for pipelined workloads, driven by faster command parsing and improved memory prefetching. The release also brought built-in full-text and hybrid search — a capability that, in the Redis world, required a separate RediSearch module or a standalone Elasticsearch cluster.

The most structurally significant shift came not from benchmarks but from package managers. In April 2025 — a month before antirez announced Redis’s return to open source — Arch Linux moved Redis out of its official repository into the AUR (user-maintained packages), replacing it with Valkey. Fedora 41 followed with a valkey-compat package for automatic migration. openSUSE completed its own replacement.

Linux distributions are the upstream gatekeepers of the open-source world. When a distro replaces a package, it becomes the default for thousands of downstream servers. Reversing that decision requires convincing each distribution’s maintainers individually — a process with virtually no precedent once community trust has broken. Redis’s re-open-sourcing under AGPLv3 arrived weeks too late.

There is a further complication: AGPLv3, while OSI-recognized, carries strong copyleft requirements. Organizations that modify Redis and offer it as a network service must release their modifications. Many enterprise legal teams treat AGPL as functionally close to proprietary for internal policies. The original RSALv2 and SSPLv1 licenses remain as options alongside AGPLv3 — meaning Redis’s licensing is now a three-way choice, with two non-open-source options still in play.

The Redis–Valkey story echoes MySQL’s fate after Oracle’s 2010 acquisition, which drove a significant portion of the community to MariaDB. But the dynamics are compressed and more decisive. MySQL took roughly six years to see substantial community defection. Redis’s window was fourteen months. And Valkey has, in two years, achieved both performance parity and cloud-vendor backing that MariaDB has still not fully secured more than a decade on.

The pattern is now a recognizable template in open source: a commercial operator tightens licensing on a community project; the community forks under a neutral foundation; hyperscalers back the fork; Linux distributions switch defaults; the original scrambles to reverse course. The fork wins not because its code is always superior at launch, but because governance and trust, once lost, are almost impossible to reclaim.

Redis is not standing still. Redis 8.0, released May 1, 2025, bundles native vector sets with HNSW indexing, per-field hash TTL, JSON path queries, and Redis Functions 2.0 with Lua and WebAssembly support — features that previously required the Redis Stack add-on. Redis 8.2, released February 17, 2026, added client-side caching protocol upgrades. The project’s feature roadmap is coherent and technically credible.

Valkey’s module ecosystem is expanding to match. The valkey-bundle integrates JSON operations, Bloom filters, vector search, and LDAP authentication. Valkey Search 1.2 adds full-text search, vector search, and tag filtering directly into the caching layer. Valkey 9.1, released May 19, 2026, is the first stable release of the 9.1 branch, addressing several security vulnerabilities and continuing the project’s aggressive release cadence.