Open Source Redis Fork 'Valkey' Has Momentum, Improvements, and Speed, Says Dirk Hohndel

'Dirk Hohndel, a Linux kernel developer and long-time open source leader, wanted his audience at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2024 Summit China to know he's not a Valkey developer,' writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. 'He's a Valkey user and fan.'

[Hohndel] opened his speech by recalling how the open source, high-performance key/value datastore Valkey had been forked from Redis... Hohndel emphasized that 'forks are good. Forks are one of the key things that open source licenses are for. So, if the maintainer starts doing things you don't like, you can fork the code under the same license and do better...' In this case, though, Redis had done a 'bait-and-switch' with the Redis code, Hohndale argued. This was because they had made an all-too-common business failure: They hadn't realized that 'open source is not a business model....'

While the licensing change is what prompted the fork, Hohndel sees leadership and technical reasons why the Valkey fork is likely to succeed. First, two-thirds of the formerly top Redis maintainers and developers have switched to Valkey. In addition, AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle, under the Linux Foundation's auspices, all support Valkey. When both the technical and money people agree, good things can happen.

The other reason is that Valkey already looks like it will be the better technical choice. That's because the recently announced Valkey 8.0, which builds upon the last open source version of Redis, 7.2.4, introduces serious speed improvements and new features that Redis users have wanted for some time. As [AWS principal engineer Madelyn] Olson said at Open Source Summit North America earlier this year, 'Redis really didn't want to break anything.' Valkey wants to move a bit faster. How much faster? A lot. Valkey 8.0 overhauls Redis's single-threaded event loop threading model with a more sophisticated multithreaded approach to I/O operations. Hohndel reported that 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.'


The article notes that Valkey is already being supported by major Linux distros including AlmaLinux, Fedora, and Alpine.

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