Circle September 29th on your calendar! That’s when Valkey 9.0 officially drops, bringing enterprise-grade features that solve real operational headaches without the licensing restrictions or unpredictable costs you face with Redis.
If you’ve been following Valkey since it forked from Redis, this release represents a major milestone. The same engineers who built Redis now work under the Linux Foundation’s governance, delivering a BSD-licensed, high-performance in-memory data store that drops right into your existing infrastructure. Version 9.0 takes this foundation and adds the production-ready features your team actually needs.
So what’s new?
Improved operational safety
You know the scenario: one misplaced command in production triggers a cascade failure that has everyone scrambling. Valkey 9.0 adds features to help prevent those “oops” moments and keep your systems running smoothly.
- SAFE shutdown mode: No more taking down critical nodes by accident. This mode adds an extra safeguard so a shutdown command doesn’t pull the plug on production without a deliberate, confirmed action.
- Unified auto-failover configuration: High availability should behave the same no matter where you deploy. This update standardizes failover settings across environments, making it easier to keep clusters consistent from dev to staging to production.
This means fewer emergency calls, more predictable failover behavior, and confidence that your systems will recover when problems occur.
Enterprise-grade security
Compliance audits shouldn’t require custom security workarounds or third-party tools. Valkey 9.0 builds enterprise security directly into the core platform.
The standout addition is TLS certificate-based automatic client authentication. Now, your applications can use native mutual TLS to verify connections automatically, creating certificate-backed trust between your services while integrating seamlessly with your existing identity management systems.
For organizations in regulated industries like finance, healthcare, or anywhere strict compliance matters, this native mTLS support helps you lock down access, streamline security audits, and reduce the risk of misconfiguration.
Network resilience at scale
Real-time applications break when replication stalls, and users notice when features slow down or data goes stale. Valkey 9.0 adds a new way to keep replication steady with MultiPath TCP replication support, even in less-than-perfect network conditions.
Instead of depending on a single network route, MPTCP spreads replication traffic across multiple paths simultaneously. When one connection experiences high latency or fails completely, your data keeps flowing through the remaining routes.
This particularly benefits distributed deployments and multi-region setups where network reliability varies. Your applications stay responsive, and data remains synchronized even when network conditions deteriorate.
Developer experience upgrades
The less time you spend wrestling with workarounds, the more time you have to actually ship features. Valkey 9.0 brings some thoughtful ‘quality-of-life’ updates that make development faster and debugging less painful.
- DELIFEQ command: A built-in way to handle common distributed locking patterns, no Lua scripting required. This keeps your code cleaner and reduces the risk of subtle scripting errors.
- Clearer error messages: Now you’ll see the full command name in error messages, making it easier to pinpoint what went wrong in transactional workflows.
These changes remove friction for developers, speed up troubleshooting, and help teams deliver stable features without patching together custom solutions.
Performance & benchmarking enhancements
Every performance improvement frees up resources for other tasks. Valkey 9.0 delivers measurable speed increases through AVX512 SIMD acceleration, boosting string parsing in list operations by up to 19%.
In addition, the enhanced valkey-benchmark tool adds a new rps flag with token-bucket request throttling. Instead of hammering your server at full capacity, you can now simulate realistic traffic patterns that actually reflect how your applications behave in production.
Why it matters for enterprises
Valkey 9.0 proves that open source can deliver enterprise reliability without enterprise restrictions.
You get operational safeguards that prevent downtime, security features that satisfy compliance requirements, network resilience for global deployments, and performance improvements that keep applications fast.
Most importantly, you get it without the licensing restrictions, unpredictable costs, or vendor lock-in that can come with Redis.
Run Valkey 9.0 with confidence
Valkey 9.0 features show that open source can meet enterprise needs without compromise. But getting the most out of it in production still takes planning, expertise, and around-the-clock vigilance. That’s where Percona can help.
Our team provides 24/7 enterprise-grade support for Valkey, giving you the confidence to deploy at scale, optimize performance, and keep mission-critical workloads running smoothly. Whether you’re preparing for migration, scaling up, or fine-tuning for efficiency, we’re here to make sure Valkey works the way you need it to.
Explore Percona Support for Valkey
