Valkey Turns One: How the Community Fork Left Redis in the Dust

Summary

A year ago, Redis Inc (formerly Garantia Data) made a controversial move that disrupted the open source ecosystem: it closed the source of Redis. As I wrote at the time, it was a trust-breaking decision that could have shattered the community. But instead of splintering, the community responded with purpose. Out of that disruption came Valkey, a fork that took a shot at keeping the community alive. A Return, A Reversal As part of efforts to rebuild trust with the community, Redis Inc brought back Salvatore Sanfilippo (aka Antirez), the original creator of Redis. I am genuinely excited about his return because it is already impactful. He’s following through on his promise of contributing new features and performance optimizations to Redis. More profoundly, Redis 8.0 has been open-sourced again. Redis acknowledged that adopting SSPL strained their bond with the community, questioning contributions from others in the same breath. How do you keep innovating and investing in OSS projects when cloud providers reap the profits and control the infrastructure without proportional contributions back to the projects that they exploit? The disheartening move from Redis Inc catalyzed an unprecedented wave of collaboration and contributions. Valkey became the test of the community resolve to keep itself together. One year later, Valkey hasn’t just survived – it’s thriving! The Async I/O Threading model contribution from AWS unlocked 3x+ throughput by fundamentally changing how I/O threads work inside Redis. But how do these and other contributions compare to Redis 8? Can we hit 1M RPS out of an 8 VCPU instance (c8g.2xl) on either Valkey 8.1 or Redis 8.0 (with 1KB items, 3M items in the key space, and ~500 connections)? It’s time for a bake off! Valkey 8.1 vs Redis 8.0: Can the Fork Outrun the Source? The punchline: we could not sustain 1M RPS on an 8 VCPU instance with either Valkey or Redis 8.0, but we got really close!! On a full-tuned c8g.2xl (8 VCPU), Valkey 8.1.1 pushed to 9...