When Redis changed its licensing in 2024, replacing its permissive BSD license with proprietary, source-available alternatives, it prompted a major split in the community. Within days, the Linux Foundation launched Valkey, an open source fork.

While Redis did subsequently change course again, adding the copyleft AGPLv3 open source license as an option in 2025, Valkey was already forging its own path for organizations that wanted a permissively licensed project with independent governance.

Much has happened in the intervening months, with Valkey moving to reduce its memory requirements, introducing new cluster management and access-control features, and more recently starting to use AI agents to help with maintenance work such as backporting fixes.

But for some Redis users, at least one major migration hurdle remains.

Redis, for the uninitiated, is an in-memory data store widely used for caching and other workloads where fast access is an imperative. Many applications were built to interact with Redis as though it were a single instance, and moving those applications to a distributed Valkey Cluster can mean changing code so it can deal with multiple nodes, routing, and differences in how certain commands behave. Commercial Redis products and some cloud services get around this with proxy layers that sit between the application and the underlying cluster, but companies that want to run Valkey themselves have lacked an equivalent option.

And so Percona is now looking to fill that gap with Valkey-proxy, an open source proxy that allows existing applications to connect to a Valkey Cluster without having to be rewritten.

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