From Salvatore Sanfilippo to the Valkey era

The origin and growth of Redis

Salvatore Sanfilippo, known as antirez, created Redis in 2009 to solve performance problems in his LLOOGG real-time web log analyzer. He found MySQL too slow to handle the volume of page views. He designed an in-memory data store with data types like lists, hashes, and sorted sets. Before Redis, he developed the hping packet generator and the Idle scan port scanning technique. He also created the JimTCL interpreter and the LLOOGG Memory DB. The Shuttleworth Foundation provided a 5000 USD grant in the early years. In 2010, VMware hired Sanfilippo and provided a 24 GB RAM workstation for testing. VMware sponsored the project until 2013, and Pivotal provided sponsorship from 2013 to 2015. Early contributions came from Engine Yard, Citrusbyte, and Hitmeister. Engine Yard contributed the BLPOP command. Slicehost and Linode provided virtual machines for testing. Pieter Noordhuis and Matt Stancliff provided useful code and ideas. Garantia Data was founded in 2011 and became Redis Labs in 2014. Sanfilippo complained about the name RedisDB because he owns the redis-db.com domain and wanted to keep the project name distinguishable from commercial services. Sanfilippo joined Redis Labs in 2015 to maintain the open-source side of the project.

The licensing split and Valkey

The status of the project changed in March 2024. Redis Ltd. changed the license from BSD to dual SSPL and RSALv2 models. This change prevents cloud providers from offering managed services without a commercial agreement. The decision was a response to cloud companies profiting from open-source software without sufficient contribution, which forced a group of active contributors to fork the project under the Linux Foundation to preserve software freedom.

The community forked the software.

The Linux Foundation launched Valkey within eight days of the license change. A group of six contributors from Alibaba, Amazon, Ericsson, Google, Huawei, and Tencent supported the new project. Madelyn Olson, a longtime Redis maintainer and AWS principal engineer, leads the development. Valkey remains under the permissive BSD-3 license.

Development moved fast.

In May 2025, Redis 8.0 added AGPLv3 as a third license option. While this made Redis open source again, many organizations avoid AGPL because of its copyleft requirements. Valkey 8.0 released within six months of its launch. Valkey 8.1 arrived in March 2025 and improved I/O threading for TLS connection acceptance. The project counts nearly 50 contributing companies as of 2026.

The 2026 performance and economic divide

Valkey 8.1 delivers 8 percent more operations per second than Redis OSS. It also provides a 22 percent reduction in P99 tail latency. I find the memory improvements even more significant. Valkey 8.1 uses 20 percent less memory for typical workloads.

Snap Inc. migrated 70 percent of its Redis clusters to ElastiCache Valkey in the first half of 2026. This migration reduced annual costs from $2.1 million to $840,000 while serving 5 billion daily requests. You probably know that infrastructure costs drive architecture decisions. Valkey 9.0, which released in April 2026, uses SIMD acceleration targeting AVX512 and NEON. Valkey 9.1 is the newest stable release in mid-2026. Valkey reached 100 million Docker pulls by May 2026.

Valkey is the best choice.

Redis 8 remains the leader for users needing RedisTimeSeries or the vector search capabilities in Redis 8.0. The Redis 8 Query Engine uses HNSW indexing for vector sets. Redis 8.2, released in February 2026, includes client-side caching protocol upgrades and dual cosine-plus-dot-product similarity metrics. The decision to change licenses was a massive mistake for community cohesion. Will Valkey’s module ecosystem eventually match the feature depth of Redis?