The release of Valkey 8.0, a project aimed at developing Fork DBMS Redis, has been announced. This project was created in response to the transfer of the Redis code base to a proprietary license. It is being developed on a neutral platform under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation organization, with the participation of developers from companies like Amazon, Google, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap. Notably, among the developers of Valkey is Madelin Olson, a former developer of Redis. The project’s code is written in SI and is distributed under the BSD license, with support for Linux, MacOS, OpenBSD, NETBSD, and FreeBSD.
The release of Redis 7.4 introduced the RSALV2 and SSPLV1 licenses, leading to the discrimination of certain user categories and challenging their classification as open or free. While the RSAL license allows users to use, modify, distribute, and integrate code into applications (excluding commercial or managed paid services), the SSPL license, based on the AGPLV3 license, includes a provision that extends the license requirement to the initial texts of all components involved in providing cloud services.
Both ValKey and Redis DBMSs offer features for storing data in key/value format, with support for structured data formats like lists, hashs, and sets. Additionally, they allow for the execution of LUA scripts on the server side. Data is stored in memory and synchronized with disk versions or reflected in log changes on disk to ensure data safety in case of unexpected interruptions. These DBMSs support transactions, “Publication/Subscription” mode, commands for increments/decrements, list and set operations (combination, intersection), key renaming, Master-Slave replication, multiple sampling, and atomic functions.
The release of Valkey 8.0 is being touted as a significant milestone for the project. Some changes in this release include: