The Great Redis Fork: Why We Are Moving to Valkey

Incident Report

The Betrayal of Open Source

Let's be real for a second: We all saw this coming, but it still hurts. On March 20, 2024, Redis Inc. decided to pull the rug out from under the open-source community. After years of building their empire on the backs of free contributors, they switched from the permissive BSD 3-Clause license to the restrictive RSALv2 and SSPLv1.

What does this actually mean?
In plain English: Redis is no longer "Open Source" (according to the OSI definition). It is now "Source Available." You can look at the code, but if you try to build a competing product with it (like a managed database service), their lawyers will come knocking.

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Why Did They Do It? (The "AWS Problem")

To be fair to Redis Inc., I get it. They did the hard work, and AWS (Amazon Web Services) made billions selling "ElastiCache for Redis" without giving much back. It’s the classic "Free Rider" problem.

However, the way they handled this alienated the very developers who championed Redis in the first place. By adopting the SSPL (Server Side Public License), they introduced a "poison pill" clause:

"If you offer this software as a service, you must open-source your entire management stack."

They knew AWS and Google would never do that. It was a ransom note.

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The Industry Strikes Back: Hello, Valkey!

Here is where it gets interesting. Redis Inc. probably expected the big cloud providers to just pay up. Instead, the tech giants did something much more painful: They forked it.

Within days, the Linux Foundation announced Valkey. Supported by AWS, Google, Oracle, and Ericsson, Valkey is a fork of Redis 7.2.4 (the last truly free version).

My honest take? Valkey is going to win. Why? Because spite is a powerful motivator in the tech industry. When you anger the entire Linux ecosystem and the trillion-dollar cloud giants simultaneously, you create a very powerful alliance against you.

Technical Reality: Is it Safe to Switch?

If you are a DevOps engineer sitting there worrying about your production clusters, relax. Valkey is currently a drop-in replacement. I have migrated three production clusters so far, and the process was boringly simple (which is good).

Migration via Docker Compose

You literally just need to change the image name. The ports, the commands, and even the persistence files (dump.rdb) are compatible.

version: '3.8'
services:
  cache:
    # Goodbye Redis, thanks for the memories.
    # image: redis:alpine 
    
    # Hello Valkey. No license headaches.
    image: valkey/valkey:7.2
    container_name: production_cache
    restart: always
    ports:
      - "6379:6379"
    volumes:
      - ./redis_data:/data
    # Notice: The command is still compatible, but binaries are renamed
    command: valkey-server --appendonly yes

What About Client Libraries?

This is the best part. You don't even need to change your application code. Your Python redis-py or Node.js ioredis libraries work perfectly with Valkey because it speaks the exact same RESP protocol.

The Future

Redis Inc. has announced new features for their proprietary version, like better vector search for AI. But Valkey is moving fast too, with plans for multi-threaded I/O performance improvements that the community has wanted for years.

Final Verdict: If you are starting a new project today, use Valkey. It’s where the open-source spirit lives now. Redis Inc. chose profit over community, which is their right, but we have the right to choose freedom.