Valkey just had a 17x year. Its lead maintainer still doesn’t want Redis to die.

Valkey 9.1 is now generally available, announced at Open Source Summit North America. Key highlights include up to 10% memory reduction with no configuration changes, database-level ACLs for multi-tenant isolation, automated TLS certificate reloading, and a new CLUSTERSCAN feature for consistent cluster-wide key iteration. The Valkey Search module (v1.2) now integrates full-text search, numeric filtering, and vector search directly into the data store. The Valkey Admin cluster management tool reached GA, and the GLIDE client library (v2.4) added C# and PHP support along with client-side caching, built on a shared Rust core. The project reports 6 million container pulls per week — a 17x increase year-over-year — with enterprise adopters including Apple and Uber. Lead maintainer Madelyn Olson also discussed using AI agents to combat maintainer burnout by automating backporting, CI testing, and security scanning.