At the Open Source Summit in Denver, I grabbed a few minutes with Madelyn Olson, one of the maintainers behind Valkey, a project that’s been making waves in the infrastructure world.
Madelyn had just finished delivering a keynote titled “Your Core Infrastructure Should Be Vendor Neutral and Open Source,” and the theme carried right into our conversation.
Valkey is a community-driven fork of Redis, launched after Redis Labs changed its license. Unlike Redis, Valkey remains under the BSD 3-Clause License, fully open source and governed by the Linux Foundation.
The message is simple but significant: your core infrastructure shouldn’t be at the mercy of vendor decisions.
Madelyn emphasized that Valkey is built as a drop-in replacement for Redis. For engineering teams who already rely on Redis’ speed and simplicity, switching to Valkey doesn’t require rewriting your apps–it just gives you back confidence in the license and long-term governance model.
We didn’t dwell on licensing drama. Instead, we talked about momentum. Valkey has a growing group of contributors, active discussions about its future, and a roadmap shaped by the people who use and maintain it, not just a single company.
When I asked Madelyn what stood out most at the summit, she mentioned how energizing it was to see so many new contributors from adjacent communities. The project isn’t just preserving Redis, it’s evolving in the open.
If you’re a CTO or architect re-evaluating the tools your stack depends on, especially for caching or real-time workloads, Valkey deserves a closer look. It’s stable, familiar, and driven by principles that matter, like vendor neutrality and open governance.
And if your team is already exploring Valkey, or grappling with Redis license concerns, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Drop a comment and let’s compare notes.