The rise and license shift of Redis and Valkey

Salvatore Sanfilippo created Redis in 2009 using the BSD license. The project grew from a simple caching tool into a real-time database for large-scale back-end transactions and content-serving systems. By 2016, the Redis Enterprise platform supported over 61,000 accounts, including 7,000 enterprise customers. Sanfilippo joined Redis Labs in 2015 and transferred his IP to the company before stepping down in 2020. In March 2024, Redis Labs transitioned from the open-source BSD license to the restrictive Server Side Public License (SSPLv1). The decision by Redis Labs to move from the permissive BSD license to the restrictive SSPLv1 in March 2024 prompted the immediate creation of the Valkey fork by former maintainers who sought to protect the project’s open-source legacy. This change caused a drop in external contributors. A paper by Dawn Foster showed that external contributors with five or more commits dropped to zero in the six months following the relicense. In 2016, Redis reported a substantial increase in enterprise customers, including companies like Vodafone and Dell. The Redis Enterprise platform powered solutions for mobile applications, e-commerce, and real-time analytics. Redis partnered with AWS Marketplace to offer integrated billing to its enterprise users. The company expanded its headquarters in Mountain View and also opened a London office. Before the 2024 shift, Redis changed how it licensed its Redis Modules. It used the Apache License with the added Commons Clause, which restricted others from selling and hosting those modules. At that time, Redis stated that the license for open-source Redis would remain BSD.

The Valkey Fork and Cloud Vendor Competition

The license change triggered the creation of Valkey, a fork supported by the Linux Foundation. Madelyn Olson, who worked as a long-time Redis maintainer at AWS, initiated the project to keep the community together. Valkey gained support from companies such as Oracle, Ericsson, Snap, DigitalOcean, and Broadcom. Because Valkey uses the BSD 3-clause license, it is truly open source. AWS launched ElastiCache for Valkey and MemoryDB for Valkey at lower prices than the existing Redis version. You know the struggle of managing database connections in legacy client-server architectures. The license change shattered community trust.

The Valkey community includes partners such as Ampere, AlmaLinux OS Foundation, Memurai, and Instaclustr by NetApp. These companies work to improve I/O performance, cluster stability, and reliability. In 2026, AWS and Google default new instances to Valkey because Redis 7.2 hit end-of-life in February. Valkey remains the superior choice for users demanding true open-source freedom. Users can find Valkey in major Linux distributions like AlmaLinux, Fedora, and Alpine. These distributions are actively taking steps to migrate users to Valkey.

Redis 8 and the Return of Sanfilippo

Redis 8.0 reached general availability under the OSI-approved AGPLv3 license. This release follows a year of competition with the Valkey fork. Salvatore Sanfilippo rejoined the company as an evangelist five months after re-entering. He works on vector capabilities, such as a new data type where the score functions as a vector. This new data type is an evolution of sorted sets designed to handle multi-dimensional data. Redis 8.0 delivers specific performance improvements:

• Up to 87% faster commands
• Up to 2x higher throughput in operations per second
• Up to 18% faster replication

Redis 8.0 also integrates Redis Stack technologies like JSON, Time Series, and the Redis Query Engine. Valkey lacks these integrated features. While Valkey provides high performance, it lacks the integrated modules of Redis. Will the return of the original creator sufficiently halt the migration to Valkey?