Google Cloud launches Memorystore for Valkey, a 100% open-source key-value service

Editor's note: Ping Xie is a Valkey maintainer on the Valkey Technical Steering Committee (TSC)

The Memorystore team is thrilled to announce the preview launch of Valkey 7.2 support on Memorystore to provide users with a truly open-source and high performance key-value service.

The introduction of Memorystore for Valkey into the Memorystore portfolio alongside Memorystore for Redis Cluster and Memorystore for Redis is a direct response to customer demand, and is a game-changer for organizations seeking high-performance data management solutions relying on 100% open source software. Beginning today, customers can easily create a fully-managed Valkey Cluster from the console or gcloud and scale in or out to meet the demands of their workloads.

Valkey has rapidly become an open-source key-value datastore chosen for its exceptional performance, scalability, and adaptability. Valkey 7.2 is fully compatible with Redis 7.2 and the most popular Redis clients such as Jedis, redis-py, node-redis, and go-redis, offering Google Cloud customers a truly open source option through the Linux Foundation. 

Customers are already replacing their existing key-value software with Valkey, leveraging Valkey for popular use cases like caching, session management, real-time analytics, and much more. 

Memorystore for Valkey launches with all the GA features of Memorystore for Redis Cluster, providing an almost identical (and code compatible) Valkey Cluster experience for our customers. Just like Memorystore for Redis Cluster, Memorystore for Valkey offers zero-downtime scaling in or out, RDB and AOF persistence, instances up to 14.5 TB, single-zone or multi-zone clusters, out-of-the box integrations with Google Cloud, ultra low and reliable performance, and much more. 

With an exciting roadmap of features and capabilities across Memorystore for Valkey, Memorystore for Redis Cluster, and Memorystore for Redis, we look forward to supporting our customers on whichever engine they choose. 

Valkey’s momentum

Since the open-source community launched Valkey in partnership with the Linux Foundation in March 2024 (1, 2, 3), just days after Redis Inc. removed the open-source license for Redis, we’ve had the pleasure of partnering with developers and companies around the world to catapult Valkey into the forefront of key-value data stores to become a top open source software (OSS) project. As a staunch supporter of open source software, we were thrilled to join this community launch, alongside partners and industry experts such as Snap, Ericsson, AWS, Verizon, Alibaba Cloud, Aiven, Chainguard, Heroku, Huawei, Oracle, Percona, Ampere, AlmaLinux OS Foundation, Broadcom, DigitalOcean, Memurai, Instaclustr by NetApp, and many others. 

With the backing of the previous core OSS Redis maintainers who weren’t employed at Redis Inc., plus thousands of passionate developers, the Valkey community has become a vibrant community dedicated to making Valkey the best open source key-value service on the market. 

Mercado Libre is the largest e-commerce, fintech, and logistics company in Latin America, with over 100 million unique active users per month. Diego Delgado, a Software Senior Expert at Mercado Libre, shares his thoughts on Valkey:

"Handling billions of requests per minute while maintaining low latency is crucial for us at Mercado Libre, making caching solutions indispensable. We’re particularly excited about the innovative opportunities that Valkey presents. We’re looking forward to exploring its new features and contributing to this open-source project."

The best is yet to come

Launching Memorystore for Valkey 7.2 expands Memorystore’s portfolio of offerings beyond Redis Cluster, Redis, and Memcached. And we’re even more excited for the game-changing features coming in Valkey 8.0. In the first release candidate for Valkey 8.0, the community launched major enhancements across five key dimensions of performance, reliability, replication, observability, and efficiency. Customers will be able to adopt Valkey 7.2 and then upgrade to Valkey 8.0 with a single click or command. And just like Valkey 7.2, Valkey 8.0 is compatible with Redis 7.2, ensuring a smooth transition for users. 

Perhaps the most exciting enhancements for Valkey 8.0 are on the performance front, where asynchronous I/O threading enables parallel processing of commands that can result in multi-core nodes performing at a factor of over 2x that of Redis 7.2. On the reliability side, several enhancements donated by Google dramatically improve the reliability of Cluster scaling operations by replicating slot migration states, ensuring automatic failover for empty shards, and ensuring slot state recovery is handled. With a multitude of other enhancements across many dimensions (release notes), the excitement for Valkey 8.0 is already driving the demand for Valkey 7.2 on Memorystore. 

The community is also accelerating development of Valkey’s capabilities through open-source enhancements which augment and extend Valkey’s functionality, similar to how Redis previously extended functionality through modules with restrictive licensing. Recently published RFCs (“Request for Comments”) span capabilities across vector search for ultra-high performance vector similarly search, JSON for native JSON support, and BloomFilters for space efficient and high performance probabilistic filters.

Sanjeev Mohan, Principal Analyst at SanjMo and Former Gartner VP, shares his perspective:

“Valkey is important for continuing to advance community-led efforts to provide feature-rich, open-source database alternatives. The launch of Valkey support in Memorystore is yet another example of Google’s dedication to providing truly open and accessible solutions for users. Their contributions to Valkey not only benefit developers seeking flexibility, but also strengthens the broader open-source ecosystem”

 With so much innovation in Valkey 8.0, open-source enhancements like vector search and JSON, and for client libraries (see GLIDE), it’s clear that Valkey is going to be a game-changer in the high-performance data management space. 

Valkey: your KEY to an OSS future

Check out Memorystore for Valkey today (console, documentation) and create your first Cluster via the UI console or with a simple gcloud command. Scale in or scale out without downtime and take advantage of the OSS Redis compatibility to easily port over your applications. 

Join us and many others in building OSS Valkey into the #1 key-value service on the market by contributing to the Valkey Github repository.