Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon MemoryDB announce support for Valkey

Since its inception, AWS has been the best place for customers to build and run open source software in the cloud. AWS is proud to support open source projects, foundations, and partners. We believe that open source is good for everyone and we are committed to bringing the value of open source to our customers, and the operational excellence of AWS to open source communities.

In March 2024, less than a week after Redis Inc. announced that future versions of Redis would no longer be open-source, the Linux Foundation, Redis OSS developers, and contributors united to create the Valkey project. Valkey is an open source high performance key-value datastore. It is designed as a drop-in replacement for Redis OSS. It is stewarded by the Linux Foundation and rapidly improving with contributions from a vibrant developer community. Hosting the project under the Linux Foundation ensures vendor neutrality and reassures the community that the open source license won’t be revoked or subject to the whims of a single organization. With over 500K container pulls, thousands of contributions, and support from 40+ companies, Valkey has seen rapid adoption in the last six months since the project was created.

As of October 8^th 2024, we’ve added support for Valkey 7.2 on Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon MemoryDB, our fully managed in-memory services. In this post, we discuss the AWS contributions to Valkey, AWS commitment to making Valkey more accessible for ElastiCache and MemoryDB customers, and how customers can start using it in their applications.

AWS contributions to Valkey

AWS has a long history of contributing to Redis OSS. For example, AWS previously contributed several major features in Redis OSS 7 including fine grained access control over keys and commands, native hostname support for clustered configuration which enables TLS security, and partitioned channels for scalable pub/sub.

Earlier this year, we launched Valkey General Language Independent Driver for the Enterprise (Valkey GLIDE), an open source Valkey (and Redis OSS) compatible client. Valkey GLIDE is easily configurable and a reliable way to connect to Valkey and Redis OSS datastores. We decided to launch GLIDE since customers told us that they want to reduce unexpected impact to their applications when using open-source clients due to misconfigured clients, incorrect connection management, and gaps in observability. GLIDE is an example of how we have used our operational experience to improve reliability for customers’ workloads. Using techniques like active connection management, customers see fewer application failures during unplanned failures when using GLIDE as their client. GLIDE is available for Java, Python, Node.js, and we’re also working with the open source community on the Go implementation of GLIDE.

AWS also contributed to open source Valkey 8.0, including in areas of performance and reliability. A significant feature in Valkey 8.0 was the introduction of a new I/O threading architecture, which improved the parallelism of the system and more efficiently executes commands. This new architecture supports up to 230% higher throughput and up to 70% better latency compared to Valkey 7.2, which is a fork of Redis OSS 7.2. AWS also contributed a memory optimization that reduces up to 20.6% of the memory overhead, allowing users to store more data with the same amount of memory as earlier versions

ElastiCache for Valkey

Hundreds of thousands of customers use Amazon ElastiCache to boost their applications’ performance, achieve higher scale, and optimize their cost. During Prime Day 2024, ElastiCache served more than quadrillion requests on a single day with a peak of over 1 trillion requests per minute. With ElastiCache for Valkey, customers can benefit from a fully managed experience built on open source technology while taking advantage of the 13+ years of operational excellence, security, and reliability that ElastiCache provides.

With today’s launch, AWS is making Valkey accessible to more customers. ElastiCache Serverless for Valkey is priced 33% lower than ElastiCache Serverless for Redis OSS, and node-based ElastiCache for Valkey is priced 20% lower than other node-based ElastiCache engines. The minimum cache size for ElastiCache Serverless for Valkey is 100MB compared to 1 GB for ElastiCache Serverless for Redis OSS. With these pricing changes, customers can now start using Valkey quickly and at a lower price. For example, customers can create a cache using ElastiCache Serverless for Valkey in under a minute, priced as low as $6 per month. Additionally, customers who are using ElastiCache reserved nodes can easily switch from ElastiCache for Redis OSS to ElastiCache for Valkey, and retain their existing discounted reserved node rates across all node sizes within the same family.

MemoryDB for Valkey

Amazon MemoryDB is a Valkey- and Redis OSS-compatible, durable, in-memory database service that delivers ultra-fast performance. With MemoryDB, data is stored in memory, which enables customers to achieve microsecond read and single-digit millisecond write latency and high throughput. Starting today, customers can also use Valkey 7.2 on MemoryDB. MemoryDB for Valkey is priced 30% lower than MemoryDB on Redis OSS. Similar to ElastiCache, customers who are using MemoryDB reserved nodes can easily switch from MemoryDB for Redis OSS to MemoryDB for Valkey, and retain their existing discounted reserved node rates across all node sizes within the same family.

Looking ahead

As a supporter of the Valkey project, we will work together with the broader community of Valkey developers to build the most feature-rich in-memory key-value data store, and bring those innovations to ElastiCache and MemoryDB.

ElastiCache for Valkey and MemoryDB for Valkey are now available in all AWS Regions that these services support. For a step-by-step guide on how to get started with ElastiCache for Valkey and MemoryDB for Valkey, refer to Get started with Amazon Elasticache for Valkey and Get started with Amazon MemoryDB for Valkey.

About the author

Rashim Gupta is a Senior Manager, Product Management at AWS and is the head of product for Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon MemoryDB. He has over six years of experience in AWS, working as a PM across compute, storage, and databases.