Open wins again: What Valkey’s meteoric rise tells us about the future
A product manager’s perspective on navigating an ecosystem in flux.
When Redis Inc. changed its core product license, few anticipated how fast the aftershocks would reshape the caching world. But the emergence of Valkey – a Linux Foundation–governed fork – has sparked one of the most significant realignments in open source infrastructure since OpenSearch split from Elastic.
At the heart of this shift? A tension between innovation, freedom, and control, and the very real needs of developers and enterprises caught in the middle.
As someone watching this from the product frontlines, I know that the Valkey story isn’t just about a fork. It’s about how ecosystems evolve when trust, governance, and developer goodwill become market-defining forces. It’s about the businesses asking: Now what?
The rise of Valkey: More than a reaction
Redis Inc.’s pivot away from an open source license was meant to protect monetization, especially from hyperscalers. But instead of cornering the market, it opened the door, which may have led to their ‘reversing course’ of their licensing announced May 1, 2025, but more on that later.
Enter Valkey, backed by major cloud players like AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle. It’s fully open, foundation-governed, and (perhaps most crucially) now seen by many as the spiritual successor to Redis.
As Madelyn Olson, a former core contributor to Redis and a principal engineer at AWS, explained in the New Stack article, Valkey: A Redis Fork With a Future:
“A lot of people just look at the fact that the new license Redis is putting out is free for end users. But what they’re really not seeing is that all of the contributors that currently worked on Redis often won’t work with that new license.”
That’s a fundamental shift – not just in codebase, but in community.
With AWS committing Valkey to its ElastiCache and MemoryDB roadmaps, and original Redis maintainers now contributing to Valkey, momentum is snowballing. This isn’t just another fork. It’s the new center of gravity.
The market’s three-act play
- Redis Inc. is doubling down on proprietary innovation, like Redis Flex (a hybrid memory/disk engine) and AI modules, but also trying to reframe its stance with a recent licensing shift. Starting with Redis 8.0, they, a year after changing their license, are now offering the product under a tri-license: RSALv2, SSPLv1, and AGPLv3. While this appears to offer flexibility, it still restricts cloud vendors and adds complexity for adopters. It’s a tactical move – part open source nod, part license hedge – to keep both community goodwill and monetization paths alive.
- Cloud vendors embrace open, offering Valkey as a license-free alternative. The message? “Redis, but without the strings.”
- Alternate players reposition. To stay relevant, DragonflyDB and KeyDB now lean into tech advantages, performance claims, or niche use cases.
The result? A familiar product strategy landscape: open vs. closed, platform vs. niche, velocity vs. lock-in.
What comes next: Open source as a service layer
Valkey didn’t just fork code. It forked expectations.
Enterprise teams now face a new set of needs:
- Migrate safely from Redis to Valkey
- Operate across multi-cloud environments
- Monitor, secure, and scale their caches like they do their databases
This is where open-source service providers like Percona have a critical role to play—not just as contributors but as enablers.
Percona founder Peter Zaitsev put it plainly in his blog post Open Source Bait and Switch: Licensing and Beyond:
“Whatever you call it, a unilateral license change will be seen as breaking an unwritten contract with your community – a sign of betrayal.”
His take isn’t just philosophical. It’s a product truth: no roadmap or feature list matters if developers don’t feel safe building on it.
That tension hasn’t gone away. Even with AGPLv3 in the mix, Redis’s new tri-license model doesn’t eliminate uncertainty. For many teams, especially those operating in regulated environments or multi-cloud stacks, the perceived risk remains. Valkey’s simplicity, licensed under the BSD 3-Clause and governed by the Linux Foundation, continues to be a compelling contrast.
So, what does “safe” look like in this new ecosystem?
- Managed Valkey offerings that don’t force vendor lock-in.
- Migration toolkits to ease the transition from Redis.
- Kubernetes-native deployment scripts and monitoring integrations.
- Security and backup enhancements for enterprises that need more than just “free.”
Zaitsev again:
“The Linux Foundation gathered an impressive list of supporters for Valkey, and Percona is one of them,” in Redis, Valkey, and Percona’s Ongoing Support of Open Source.
But being on the list isn’t the goal. Being a leader in how Valkey is adopted and operated at scale? That’s the real opportunity.
Why this matters (even if you don’t use Redis)
Even if Valkey isn’t on your radar yet, the trend it represents should be.
We’re entering a phase where forks aren’t just reactions—they’re product accelerators. They shake up markets, rally developers, and remind us that trust is a feature of open source.
From Elastic to Terraform to Redis, the message is clear: change the rules, and the community will write its own playbook.
For companies navigating that shift, the real winners will be those who don’t just sell software but also help users keep building.
Redis’s latest licensing strategy may feel more nuanced, but the underlying play is clear: control remains central. In contrast, Valkey continues to rally users, contributors, and platforms by doubling down on openness and clarity. That’s what makes this moment so pivotal; it’s not just about features anymore. It’s about who you trust to build with.
Learn more about Percona’s commitment to Valkey
About the Author
Andrey GlazkovAndrey Glazkov is a Product Manager at Percona, where he leads product strategy across Support, Professional Services, and Managed Services. While his primary focus is on these service pillars, he also spearheads initiatives in emerging technologies, notably Valkey (the open-source fork of Redis). Andrey has been instrumental in developing Percona’s enterprise-grade support for Valkey, aligning it with the company’s commitment to open-source excellence. He also played a key role in launching Percona’s EOL support for MySQL 5.7 EOL. Prior to Percona, Andrey drove LLM-powered product initiatives at PwC. He holds an MBA with a focus on Data Analytics from Arizona State University. Andrey combines technical fluency with go-to-market strategy to drive product innovation and customer success. He lives in Alexandria, VA.
