Forking Ahead: A Year of Valkey

In March of 2024, the open source community witnessed the birth of Valkey, a new BSD-licensed high-performance key-value datastore. Born as a fork in response to Redis OSS 7.2's license change, Valkey represented a commitment to maintaining truly open source infrastructure options for developers worldwide.

The fork began with a dedicated group of contributors from AWS, Ericsson, Oracle, and Google. What started as a technical response to a licensing decision quickly evolved into a community rallying around shared values of openness and collaboration.

Building Valkey’s Momentum Through Community

Valkey's early days were defined by rapid community expansion. Support from Percona, Canonical, Aiven, and numerous other organizations—growing to over 20 companies within just the first few months—showed a collective desire to ensure the project's success.

This groundswell of cross-industry collaboration led to the project finding a home at the Linux Foundation, blossoming into a fast, reliable, and optimized database.

From Fork to Feature-Rich Platform

The Valkey community embraced a collaborative development model that enabled substantial progress in a short timeframe. Within its first six months of its founding, the community delivered Valkey 8.0, followed by Valkey 8.1 in April of 2025.

Both releases focused on critical areas that developers care about most: performance, reliability, observability, extensibility, and efficiency. More than just updates, these releases were the result of intentional, community-led efforts to make Valkey trusted and future-ready.

The Impact of a Year

A year since the fork, Valkey has emerged with widespread support, due in part to its thriving community and ease of use as a drop-in replacement for Redis OSS. The project now counts nearly 50 contributing companies, with a GitHub repository boasting 19.8K stars and 761 forks.

As Madelyn Olsen noted: "A 1,000 commits, 150 contributors, 5M+ Docker pulls and 13 releases later, the community is thriving and doing better than ever. I'm so proud of what we've accomplished."

Technical Achievements in Year One

The 8.1 release, coming just one year after the fork, exemplifies the project's technical evolution:

Performance

• New Hash Table
• Iterator Prefetching
• I/O Threads Improvements
• Replication Improvements
• Active Defrag Improvements

Observability

• Log Improvements
• Extending the Slowlog to Commandlog
• Improved Latency Insights

Extensibility

• Programmability

The Power of Community Innovation

One of the unique strengths of Valkey's open source approach is evident in how quickly the project’s members collaborated and delivered essential modules that extended its capabilities. The community has already developed three key modules:

• Search: For advanced querying capabilities
• JSON: For native JSON data support
• Probabilistic Bloom Filter: For space-efficient, probabilistic set membership checks with customizable and scalable filters 

The project is also embracing modern development practices, as Dmitry Polyakovsky, OCI Cache Tech Lead, explains: "Valkey community is also actively investing in supporting module development in Rust using https://github.com/valkey-io/valkeymodule-rs SDK. Improvements we are making to the SDK are making it easier to develop new modules while taking advantage of features like memory safety provided by Rust."

Looking Ahead

Valkey's first year demonstrates how open source communities can come together to address common challenges and create sustainable technical solutions. With two major releases delivered in its first twelve months, the project has established both technical credibility and community momentum and stands as a testament to what's possible when developers, users, and organizations collaborate through open source foundations to build technology that meets real-world needs.

Join the Community

If you're interested in learning more or contributing to Valkey, join the community!