AWS Adds Support, Drops Prices, for Redis-Forked Valkey
Cloud giant Amazon Web Services has expanded support for Valkey, the Linux Foundation-backed open source fork of the previously-open source Redis key value data store.
In March, Redis restricted the license of its namesake in-memory data store, moving from an open source license to a Business Source License (BSL). A number of code contributors to the project, including those from AWS, quickly forked the data store into Valkey.
Valkey for ElastiCache and MemoryDB
On Thursday, AWS added support for Valkey 7.2 on two of its managed in-memory services, Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon MemoryDB. Both services already support Redis.
ElastiCache is a managed in-memory service, an easier-to-manage front end for either Redis and memcache, for those who need a real-time throughput for their apps.
Amazon likes to boast that during Prime Day 2024, ElastiCache served more than a quadrillion requests, with a peak of over 1 trillion requests per minute.
MemoryDB also offers microsecond-response caching capabilities and can store data via a permanent log.
Earlier this year, AWS released the Valkey GLIDE, a connector for bridging Redis and Valkey. It comes in Java, Python, and Node.js flavors.
Price Cuts for Valkey
AWS also cut costs of the Valkey packages so that they would be lower than their Redis equivalents.
ElastiCache Serverless for Valkey is priced 33% lower than ElastiCache Serverless for Redis, and 20% lower in the node-based ElastiCache.
The portions can be smaller too: Users can allot a cache with a minimum of 100MB cache, compared to the 1GB minimum for the Redis equivalent.
Likewise, MemoryDB for Valkey is priced 30% lower than MemoryDB on Redis.
Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist of the AWS-focused Duckbill Group, found strategic significance in the price differences between the Redis and Valkey offerings, noting it gave Redis customers an incentive to move to Valkey.
“It’s almost as if AWS discovered that Redis’ service margin was just taking up space in their massive bank vaults,” the analyst quipped.
AWS and Valkey
AWS contributed to the Redis software when it was open source, bequeathing fine grained access control over keys and commands, native hostname support for clustered configuration and partitioned channels for scalable pub/sub for version 7.
After Valkey went its own way, AWS contributed the first major version of Valkey, Valkey 8.0, helping out with a new I/O threading architecture and some memory optimization that reduces up to 20.6% of the memory overhead.
More Activity Around the Data Store
Last week, Google announced that it would be bringing vector processing to managed services for both Redis — called Memorystore for Redis Cluster — and for Valkey, Memorystore for Valkey 7.2.
In the meantime, Redis has released Redis 8, the now BSL-licensed version of the data store system. The new release supports seven new data structures (“JSON, time series, and five probabilistic types,” the news release states), has an updated query engine, and can now do vector search and geospatial queries.
