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Valkey’s first year ran from its March 28, 2024 launch to the release of Valkey 8.1 on April 2, 2025. Created after Redis Inc. announced a license change, the project began as an open-source continuation of Redis 7.2.4 under the BSD 3-Clause license. By its first anniversary, it had delivered two major releases and begun developing its own technical direction.
Why Valkey was created
On March 28, 2024, the Linux Foundation announced plans to form Valkey after Redis Inc. announced a license change. The new project would continue development from Redis 7.2.4, use the permissive BSD 3-Clause license, and operate under open governance, according to the Linux Foundation’s launch announcement.
That starting point matters when comparing Valkey and Redis: Valkey was not initially a wholly separate implementation, but a community project built from the Redis 7.2.4 code line. The announcement establishes Valkey’s license and governance at launch; it does not settle current feature parity, licensing advice, migration effort, support lifecycle, or total cost.
In April 2024, the Linux Foundation described a Valkey 7.2.5 release candidate and announced additional partners. Those early steps helped establish the project, while its first major technical milestone arrived later that year.
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What changed in Valkey’s first year
Valkey 7.2 carried the project forward
The 7.2 line provided continuity with the code Valkey inherited. In its year-end retrospective, the Valkey project characterized this line as carrying the initial project forward while the community organized development and distribution. The project described availability through package managers, containers, and operators, as well as managed services; those are the channels it reported in December 2024, not a guarantee of current availability. See the Valkey 2024 year-end retrospective.
Valkey 8.0 introduced a community-driven release
Released on September 16, 2024, Valkey 8.0 was described by the Linux Foundation as the first version fully driven by the community. Its development emphasized multi-core utilization and asynchronous I/O, alongside work on cluster scaling, replication, reliability, and observability. This made 8.0 more than a version-number change: it marked the project’s first substantial step toward shaping its own release direction. The milestone and feature themes are outlined in the Foundation’s Valkey 8.0 announcement.
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 the Foundation’s release claim, not a universal result: performance depends on workload, configuration, and hardware, and the figure should not be applied to other systems without comparable testing.
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Valkey 8.1 marked the anniversary
On April 2, 2025, the Linux Foundation announced Valkey 8.1 alongside the project’s one-year anniversary. The release was presented as an advance in performance and observability, with an early module ecosystem that included a Bloom filter. The Foundation reported over 150 unique contributors to core at that point; this is a contributor count, not a user or installation count. Details appear in the Valkey 8.1 announcement.
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What the first-year numbers do—and do not—show
Valkey’s early figures describe project activity, not independently measured adoption. The Linux Foundation reported over 150 unique contributors to core around the April 2025 anniversary. Separately, the Valkey project’s one-year investment article reported two major releases during the first year and corporate participants increasing from 22 to 47. These are publisher-reported figures with different scopes; neither establishes active users, market share, or production deployments. The project’s figures are in its one-year investment update.
The project’s December 2024 retrospective also cited a survey finding that 63% of respondents familiar with Valkey had known of it for less than six months after its establishment. Without the survey’s sponsor, sample, and methodology, that statistic cannot serve as a reliable adoption measure.
Accordingly, the first year supports a clear account of development pace and community formation, but not a conclusion about Valkey’s share of the database market. The cited announcements and retrospectives do not provide an independently audited user count, adoption census, or complete benchmark methodology.
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After the first-year period, Valkey continued with later releases. Its year-end retrospective published in 2026 describes 8.1 and 9.0 and reports 346 active contributors during 2025. That figure covers activity in the subsequent year, so it should not be folded into the first-year contributor count. See the Valkey 2025 year-end retrospective.
Quick Recap
What Valkey’s first year established
- Valkey began in March 2024 as a Linux Foundation project continuing from Redis 7.2.4 under the BSD 3-Clause license and open governance.
- The September 2024 release of Valkey 8.0 was identified as the first version fully driven by the community and brought substantial work in performance, scaling, reliability, and observability.
- Valkey 8.1 arrived on the first anniversary, with the Foundation reporting over 150 unique contributors to core.
- Project and Foundation figures document releases and participation, but do not establish user totals or market share.
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