Valkey - A Redis fork from Linux Foundation

Redis is one of the widely used key value database. It can be used as NoSQL database, Cache, Message broker, Streaming engine. Redis basically a synonym to cache. If there is requirement to do caching in any of the project, Redis used to be first choice for the developers.

Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets, bloom filters with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams. Redis has built-in replication, Lua scripting, LRU eviction, transactions, and different levels of on-disk persistence.

Redis version before 7.4 was released under BSD-3-Clause license and after 7.4, it adopted dual licensing. Redis is built by community members and developers across the globe have given their contribution. Change in licensing hurt many people, most of the core developers are not interested with this decision.

Linux Foundation announced their intent to fork Redis and named it as ValKey. This is a nice name, Redis is basically a key-value database. They have created a github repo for developers to contribute. Most of the core developers are expected to contribute to ValKey project. License will remain the same BSD-3-Clause. Industry participants, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc. are supporting Valkey.

This is really a great move and a commendable decision from Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, ONAP, PyTorch, RISC-V, SPDX, OpenChain, and more. They have now added ValKey to their portfolio.