Redis is No Longer Open Source. Is Valkey the Successor? - OpenObservability Talks S5E01

Redis is no longer open source. Just a few months ago, in March 2024, the project was relicensed, leaving its vast community confused. But the community did not give up, and started work to fork Redis to keep it open. 

In this episode, we delve into the Valkey project, a prominent fork of Redis, established under the Linux Foundation, which brought together important figures from the Redis community, as well as leading industry giants including AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle and others. Valkey has rapidly gained momentum and just reached General Availability (GA). 

Join us as we explore the motivations behind Valkey's creation, hear first-hand stories on its foundation and journey to GA, and learn of its Redis compatibility, roadmap and implications for the open-source community. 

Valkey's first Contributor Summit is taking place June 5-6 in Seattle and we will bring you announcements and updates hot off the summit. Our guest is Kyle Davis, the Senior Developer Advocate on the Valkey project, and a past contributor for Redis. 

Kyle currently works at AWS, a founding member of Valkey, and has a long history with open source and with forks. He was a founding contributor to the OpenSearch project, which started as a fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana after the latter's relicensing off OSS. Most recently Kyle worked to build a community around Bottlerocket OSS project.  

The episode was live-streamed on 10 June 2024 and the video is available at youtube.com/live/HQ7TAdQpxu4

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Show Notes:

01:12 - Episode intro, Kyle Davis’ Redis background 

05:43 - Redis relicensing off open source 

10:10 - Valkey vs. other Redis open source forks

16:50 - drop-in replacement of Redis

19:35 - Redis user experience during the relicensing

28:50 - From fork to GA in less than a month

34:00 - Valkey roadmap and Contributor Summit updates

40:00 - Valkey’s Technical Steering Committee and leadership

44:14 - what Valkey latest GA is about 

Resources:

Valkey announced: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/horovits_redis-opensource-activity-7179186700470861824-Gghq

Valkey first GA and new member companies: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/horovits_redis-valkey-valkey-activity-7186263342041198593-fsY3

Announcements from Valkey's first Contributor Summit: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/horovits_valkey-welcomes-new-partners-amid-growing-activity-7209084153718362112-OfdI/

For Kubernetes 10th anniversary - special episode with Kelsey Hightower: https://logz.io/blog/kubernetes-and-beyond-2023-reflection/?utm_source=devrel&utm_medium=devrel

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Dotan Horovits

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Twitter: @horovits

LinkedIn: in/horovits

Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon

Kyle Davis

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LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kyle-davis-linux/

Mastodon: @linux_mclinuxface@fosstodon.org