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Freedom251 › Blog › Linux Foundation

A Year of Valkey: From Redis Fork to Community-Led Releases

By Freedom251 Team · · 4 min read

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Valkey’s first year ran from the Linux Foundation’s March 28, 2024 announcement to the release of Valkey 8.1 on April 2, 2025. It began as an open-source response to Redis Inc.’s license change, initially carried forward Redis 7.2.4, and then established a community-led release direction with Valkey 8.0. The year’s milestones show a project taking shape—not an independently measured count of users or proof of market share.

What is Valkey, and why was it created?

Valkey is an open-source, in-memory data store developed as a community project. The Linux Foundation announced its formation on March 28, 2024, after Redis Inc. announced a license change. At launch, the Foundation said Valkey would continue development from Redis 7.2.4, use the BSD 3-Clause license, and operate under open governance. The Linux Foundation’s launch announcement sets out that original scope.

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That history makes Valkey a Redis fork, but the first year was not simply a new name for the same code. The initial 7.2 line provided continuity; Valkey 8.0 marked a larger community-driven development step. The project’s origin explains the historical difference in licensing and governance at launch, but does not by itself establish present-day feature parity, migration effort, support terms, or which software best fits a particular deployment.

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How did Valkey’s first year unfold?

March and April 2024: launch and early formation

The Linux Foundation’s March announcement established the project’s stated license, governance approach, and 7.2.4 code lineage. In April, a Foundation follow-up described a 7.2.5 release candidate and additional partners. Those early steps gave the community a path to continue development while the project’s contributor and partner base formed. The Foundation’s project announcement and follow-up document the launch period.

September 16, 2024: Valkey 8.0

The Linux Foundation described Valkey 8.0 as the first version fully driven by the community. Its technical themes included greater multi-core utilization and asynchronous I/O, along with work on cluster scaling, replication, reliability, and observability. This was the clearest first-year sign that Valkey was beginning to develop beyond the initial carried-forward code line. The Valkey 8.0 announcement lists the release’s changes and the Foundation’s performance claim.

The Foundation said Valkey 8.0 reached up to 1.2 million requests per second on AWS r7g instances, more than three times the previous version in the stated test context. That is a release-announcement benchmark claim, not a general guarantee: performance varies by workload, configuration, and hardware, and the cited figure should not be applied to other systems without comparable test details.

December 20, 2024: a year-end snapshot

In its year-end retrospective, Valkey described the 7.2 line as carrying the initial project forward and 8.0 as a substantial internal step. It also reported distribution through package managers, containers, and operators, as well as managed services. These are routes the project identified at the end of 2024, not a current inventory of versions, regions, or provider capabilities. Valkey’s 2024 retrospective gives its account of the year and those distribution paths.

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April 2, 2025: the anniversary and Valkey 8.1

Valkey 8.1 became generally available on April 2, 2025, coinciding with the project’s one-year anniversary. The Linux Foundation presented the release as an advance in performance and observability and described an early module story that included a Bloom filter. Its announcement reported over 150 unique contributors to core by the anniversary; that figure counts contributors to the core project, not users or deployments. The Foundation’s Valkey 8.1 announcement reports the release details and contributor figure.

What changed technically in the first year?

The arc from the 7.2 line to 8.0 is the key technical story: Valkey first continued from the existing Redis 7.2.4 code line, then released a version the Foundation characterized as fully community-driven. The 8.0 focus on multi-core use and asynchronous I/O sat alongside changes to clustering, replication, reliability, and observability. Valkey’s year-end account also characterized 8.0 as a substantial internal change, rather than just a collection of visible features.

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Valkey’s first-year record therefore supports a measured conclusion: the project established a distinct development process and began work on performance and operational behavior. It does not provide enough information to promise that Valkey will outperform Redis for a reader’s workload, or that the two products have identical features today.

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What do the first-year community figures show?

Two project-reported measures help describe activity, but they count different things:

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  • Core contributors: The Linux Foundation reported over 150 unique contributors to core around the April 2025 anniversary. This is a contributor count within the stated scope, not an adoption statistic.
  • Corporate participants: Valkey’s 2025 article about its first-year investment reported that corporate participants rose from 22 to 47. This is the project’s own report; it does not count end users, deployments, or market share.

Valkey’s 2024 retrospective also relayed a survey finding that 63% of respondents had been familiar with Valkey for less than six months after its establishment. The published excerpt does not expose the survey sponsor, sample, or methodology, so the figure cannot serve as a reliable measure of overall adoption. Neither these figures nor the release milestones amount to an independently audited user count or a neutral census of market share. Valkey’s first-year investment article reports the corporate-participant figure.

What came after Valkey’s first year?

Valkey’s year-end 2025 retrospective describes the later 8.1 and 9.0 releases and reports 346 active contributors during 2025. Those developments belong to the period after the first anniversary; they should not be read back into the March 2024–April 2025 account. The project’s 2025 retrospective covers that subsequent period.

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Linux Foundationopen source softwareRedisSoftware HistoryValkey

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