The Linux Foundation | 28 March 2024
Community maintainers, contributors, and users will continue collaborative development of an open source, in-memory data store under the new Valkey name.
SAN FRANCISCO – MARCH 28, 2024 – Today, the Linux Foundation announced its intent to form Valkey, an open source alternative to the Redis in-memory, NoSQL data store. Project contributors quickly gathered maintainer, community, and corporate support to regroup in response to the recent license change announced by Redis Inc. Valkey will continue development on Redis 7.2.4 and will keep the project available for use and distribution under the open source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) 3-clause license.
Since the Redis project was founded in 2009, thousands of open source developers have contributed significantly to its growth and success. Many more developers use it for caching, as well as a lower latency, higher throughput data store alternative to their backend database, for real-time data analysis, session store, message broker, and many other use cases. Developers ranked Redis the sixth most used database in the 2023 Stack Overflow developer survey, and it was among the top three most admired.
To continue improving on this important technology and allow for unfettered distribution of the project, the community created Valkey, an open source high performance key-value store. Valkey supports the Linux, macOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD platforms. In addition, the community will continue working on its existing roadmap including new features such as a more reliable slot migration, dramatic scalability and stability improvements to the clustering system, multi-threaded performance improvements, triggers, new commands, vector search support, and more.
Industry participants, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc. are supporting Valkey. They are focused on making contributions that support the long-term health and viability of the project so that everyone can benefit from it.
“I worked on open source Redis for six years, including four years as one of the core team members that drove Redis open source until 7.2. I care deeply about open source software, and want to keep contributing. By forming Valkey, contributors can pick up where we left off and continue to contribute to a vibrant open source community,” said Madelyn Olson, former Redis maintainer, co-creator of Valkey, and a principal engineer at AWS.
“I am pleased to see the Valkey project come together to continue true open source development. The community's resilience and commitment to the project means we can continue the same innovative work that users have come to admire and depend upon.” said Ping Xie, Former Redis Contributor and Software Engineer, Google Cloud.
“I have been an active contributor to the project for the past few years. I’m pleased to see Valkey come together under open governance to continue the work the Redis open source community began. Through truly open collaboration, the technology will continue to evolve and provide value for all users. I’m proud to serve as one of the maintainers of Valkey and hope to serve the community to the best of my ability in that role,” said Viktor Söderqvist, Co-Maintainter of Valkey, Senior Open Source Developer, Ericsson Software Technology, Part of Ericsson.
At the Linux Foundation, Valkey will follow an open governance model, remaining community-driven and welcoming of all users and contributors. The project has already assembled a technical leadership committee of several former Redis contributors, and hundreds more community members have voiced their intent to support Valkey. To learn more about Valkey, please visit the project on GitHub.
Supporting Quotes
“Valkey is an impressive effort by longstanding contributors in the Redis community to uphold the open source principles that the project was founded on. I applaud their commitment to true collaboration and look forward to the innovations that they bring to the broader tech community as a project at the Linux Foundation,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, The Linux Foundation.
“Valkey is a fully open source successor built by long standing Redis contributors and maintainers. Fostering open collaboration that benefits all and not just a single organization is critical in building long term, sustainable open source communities. Also, having this project in the hands of a foundation, rather than a single company, means Valkey will be community-driven without surprise license changes that break trust and disrupt a level open source playing field," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, The Linux Foundation.
“Oracle is excited to see a community of long-standing Redis contributors come together to ensure a future for the project in open source with the development of Valkey. We look forward to collaborating and seeing innovation continue to flourish in the new home for this important technology,” said Jim Wright, Chief Architect, Open Source Policy, Strategy, Compliance and Alliances, Oracle.
“It is nice to see a strong community forming so quickly around Valkey. We believe that continuing to have a well maintained and innovative option for those who prefer open source will serve the community well. We look forward to supporting the open source community on this next phase of its journey,” said Andi Gutmans, GM and VP Engineering, Databases, Google Cloud.
“Open source Redis is one of today's most popular databases, and that success has been driven in large part by its active, thriving community of contributors. Through the creation of Valkey, many of the former maintainers that contributed to open source Redis are helping keep the project open for everyone, and the industry can further support them so the project can continue to evolve and improve for our customers and the community at large. We are excited to see the groundswell of support from both the community and a range of companies that all share our vision that the best way to maintain this vibrant project is through open source governance, with contributions from all,” said Jeff Carter, Vice President of Relational Databases, AWS.
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Media Contact
Noah Lehman
The Linux Foundation
nlehman@linuxfoundation.org