Why We Forked Redis: Madelyn Olson on the Future of Valkey

When Redis changed its license in 2024, the community rallied to create Valkey. But the team didn't just fork the code - they optimized it. In this deep dive, Madelyn Olson (Principal SDE at Amazon ElastiCache) explains the low-level engineering challenges of modernizing a codebase from 2009.

Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
01:19 - The Valkey Origin Story
03:40 - Getting Started with Valkey
06:26 - Valkey is a hash map over TCP
07:59 - Improving the performance without breaking anything
13:58 - What does performance mean for Valkey
18:00 - Designing for typical use cases
20:40 - What changed in Valkey 8 and 9?
28:37 - Performance improvements
31:44 - Valkey’s open source governance
32:56 - The most peculiar place to run Valkey
34:07 - No, Valkey will not be rewritten in Rust

#Valkey #Redis #SoftwareArchitecture #SystemsEngineering #OpenSource

🔗 Transcript available on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/4qcIiIw

💬 Madelyn mentions that for deep core infrastructure, rewriting existing C code in Rust might not be worth the risk vs. reward. Do you agree with this approach, or should modern caches be memory-safe by default?

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Видео Why We Forked Redis: Madelyn Olson on the Future of Valkey канала InfoQ