The main advantages of migrating to Valkey include potential cost savings, improved performance, and freedom from vendor lock-in. Because Valkey is open source, there are no licensing fees, which can lead to significant savings, especially in large-scale deployments. Performance can also be enhanced due to Valkey's implementation of multi-threaded I/O, which can better utilize modern multi-core processors for increased throughput and lower latency.

Yes and no. Valkey is designed to be a drop-in replacement for Redis 7.2.4. This means that for this version and earlier, you can migrate to Valkey with minimal changes to your application code. This is not true for later versions of Redis.

Valkey has introduced significant enhancements to its threading model, particularly with improved multi-threaded I/O. Benchmarks have shown that this can lead to substantially higher throughput and lower p99 latencies for both read and write operations compared to Redis, especially under heavy loads. This allows for better utilization of modern hardware.

While migration can be straightforward in simple deployments, production environments—especially those with clustering, high availability requirements, or strict SLAs—often introduce complexity. Options include performing a physical migration by copying the latest on-disk snapshot from Redis to Valkey, or establishing replication between Redis and Valkey to ensure a controlled cutover. In clustered setups, you can add Valkey nodes as replicas within an existing Redis cluster and promote them to primaries, but this requires careful orchestration to avoid downtime or data loss. Percona’s migration experts provide hands-on guidance, validation, and rollback planning to help you execute migrations with confidence, ensuring performance, stability, and minimal disruption to your workloads.