Why Valkey Overtook Redis After the License Change: A Deep Dive

Redis’s License Change and Community Reaction

Redis had been the open‑source benchmark for 15 years under a BSD license, powering the cache layer of roughly half of all web requests. In March 2024, Redis Inc. announced that starting with version 7.4 the project would be dual‑licensed under RSA‑v2 and SSPL‑v1, both non‑OSI‑approved licenses that restrict cloud providers from offering Redis as a managed service without a commercial agreement.

The move was seen as a way for Redis Inc. to capture revenue from cloud providers that were profiting from the project. The abrupt shift sparked outrage in the community.

Valkey: The Rapid Fork

Eight days after the announcement, the Linux Foundation launched the Valkey project. Founding members included AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap, with later participation from Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, ByteDance, Percona, Canonical and more than 50 other companies.

Valkey forked Redis 7.2.4—the last BSD‑licensed release—and kept the BSD license unchanged. Within a year, Valkey attracted over 150 contributors, 1,000+ commits, 13 releases, and more than 5 million Docker pulls.

Performance Benchmarks

Momento conducted a comparative test in April 2025 on an AWS c8g.2xlarge (Graviton4) instance with six I/O threads and IRQ core pinning. Results showed:

SET throughput: Valkey 8.1.1 = 999.8 K RPS vs Redis 8.0.0 = 729.4 K RPS (≈ 37 % faster).

SET p99 latency: Valkey 0.8 ms vs Redis 0.99 ms (≈ 23 % faster).

GET throughput: Valkey roughly 16 % ahead of Redis.

In 2026, a single‑node test of Valkey 9.1 reached 2.1 M RPS (512‑byte payload, 9 I/O threads), a 17 % improvement over Valkey 9.0.

Across 2025‑2026 tests, Valkey consistently led Redis in throughput, P99 latency, and memory usage. On AWS ElastiCache, Valkey’s hourly rate was about 20 % lower than Redis’s.

Redis Attempts to Re‑open

In December 2024, Redis founder antirez returned and announced the addition of an AGPL‑v3 license option. On May 1 2025, Redis 8.0 GA was released with AGPL‑v3 as a new option alongside the existing RSA‑v2 and SSPL‑v1 licenses. Legally, Redis became open source again, but the original BSD license was not restored.

By that time, major Linux distributions had already switched:

Arch Linux (April 2025) replaced Redis with Valkey, giving a 14‑day transition period.

Fedora 41 offered a valkey-compat package for automatic migration.

openSUSE also completed the replacement.

Changing a distribution’s default package requires convincing each maintainer, a process with few precedents.

Valkey’s Continued Acceleration

Valkey 9.0, released in October 2025, introduced per‑hash field TTL, atomic slot migration for zero‑downtime cluster scaling, and multi‑database support in cluster mode. Official data claimed 1 billion RPS for a clustered deployment, a 40 % increase over the 8.1 baseline.

AWS added Valkey 9.0 to ElastiCache in May 2026, signalling strong cloud‑provider endorsement. Two weeks later Valkey 9.1 arrived with a 10 % reduction in memory usage (no configuration changes), database‑level ACL controls, cluster‑wide consistency scans (CLUSTERSCAN), and batch expiration commands (MSETEX). Valkey Search 1.2 integrated full‑text, vector, and tag filtering directly into the cache.

Valkey maintainer Madelyn Olson emphasized that new functionality is added while keeping performance predictable, achieved through continuous investment in engine modularity.

Today Valkey is backed by 17 major vendors, including AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, ByteDance, Percona, DigitalOcean, Ericsson, and Heroku, covering a large portion of the global cloud market.

Comparative Trajectories

Redis’s path: open‑source benchmark → commercial license change → community fork → founder returns → re‑open source → users have already migrated.

Valkey’s path: rapid fork → 50+ companies join → performance parity within a year → Linux distro adoption → 10 billion RPS cluster → AWS ElastiCache official support.

The pattern mirrors MySQL vs. MariaDB, but Valkey’s shift occurred in just 14 months, far faster than the six‑year lag seen with MySQL.

Emerging Pattern of Closed‑Source → Fork → Replacement

Recent years have shown a recurring cycle: a project goes closed source, the community forks it, and the fork becomes the de‑facto replacement. Examples include:

Redis → Valkey (2024‑2026)

Terraform → OpenTofu (2023‑2024)

Elasticsearch → OpenSearch (2021‑present)

The fate of an open‑source project now depends more on governance and licensing than on the code itself.