Guest: Madelyn Olson (LinkedIn)
Company: AWS (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Earlier this year, when Redis changed its license—a pattern seen with companies like HashiCorp—the open-source community responded swiftly by launching Valkey, a vendor-neutral open-source project designed as a drop-in replacement for Redis. The project is backed by heavyweight hyperscalers like AWS and hosted by the Linux Foundation, one of the largest open-source foundations in the world.

Although Valkey is a community-driven project, it was Madelyn Olson, a long-term contributor to Redis and a Principal Engineer at AWS, who initiated the fork. I had the chance to speak with Olson at the recent Open Source Summit to talk about her involvement with open source, how Valkey came into existence and the open-source-friendly culture at AWS, which empowers developers to contribute to open source with ease.

Olson shared her journey with Redis, beginning in 2018,, where she focused on improving TLS and security features. She became a maintainer in 2020 but stepped away after the project went non-open source. In 2024, Olsen played a key role in creating Valkey (a fork of Redis), driven by the support of an active community and corporate sponsors such as Google, Ericsson, Huawei, and Tencent.

The project is moving rapidly. Valkey 8.0 has already been released, boasting 3x multi-threaded performance improvements and 20% better memory efficiency. Future enhancements include native JSON support and vector similarity search.

Highlights from the show:

Madelyn’s Involvement with Redis

• Olson explains her involvement with Redis since 2018, initially working on TLS for Amazon ElastiCache.
• Olson details her contributions to the open-source Redis project, including fixing security bugs and improving reliability.
• Olson was added as a maintainer in 2020 and continued until the project went non-open source in 2024.

Creation of Valkey

• Olson discusses the decision to create a fork of Redis after the project moved to a non-open-source license.
• The fork, named Placeholder KV, was created by a group of developers to ensure vendor neutrality.
• The project evolved into Valkey, supported by the Linux Foundation.
• The speed of the fork’s creation and the project’s traction were driven by a strong community and corporate sponsors.

Naming Valkey

• Olson describes the process of naming the project, initially considering names like OpenKV and OpenDict.
• The name Valkey was chosen to differentiate from Redis and to reflect its value as a key-value store.
• The name has grown in the community, despite initial reservations about its spelling.

Community Sentiment and License Change

• When asked about the sentiment within the Redis community after the license change, Olson explains that while some members were disappointed, the community quickly rallied to create their own releases.
• The motivation was to ensure the continuity of the project and provide a viable alternative for users.
• Olson emphasizes the importance of maintaining a strong community to keep the project alive.

Open Source Sustainability and Corporate Support

• Olson highlights the need for a mix of corporate backers and individual contributors to ensure project continuity.
• Olson mentions the importance of open governance and transparency in project decision-making.
• The presence of professional services and support companies around a project is a positive sign of long-term interest.

Building a Diverse Valkey Community

• Olson outlines the desired community for Valkey, including large corporations, individual contributors, and Linux distribution maintainers.
• Olson emphasizes the importance of a diverse community to bring fresh ideas and perspectives.
• The potential for Valkey to become upstream for various Linux distributions is a possibility.
• Olson welcomes contributions from Redis and other projects to improve the project.

Commercial Support and Open Source Challenges

• Olson also discusses the role of commercial support in making open-source projects accessible.
• Olson explains that commercial support from AWS and other vendors helps users run Valkey in production.
• The goal is to provide confidence in the project’s stability and reliability.

Valkey 8.0 Release and Performance Improvements

• Olson details the features of Valkey 8.0, launched in April, aimed at being a drop-in replacement for 7.2.
• Key improvements include 3x multi-thread performance improvements and up to 20% memory efficiency.
• Reliability was enhanced with better slot migration and improved standalone discovery.
• Observability was improved to help users identify hot shards and manage cluster health.

Future Plans and Community Feedback

• Olson discusses the future plans for Valkey, including native JSON support, Bloom filters, and vector similarity search.
• The project aims to improve existing data structures and make the clustering system more self-driving.
• Community feedback is crucial in determining new features and improvements.
• Olson emphasizes the importance of continuous improvement and staying responsive to user needs.

Exploring New Use Cases and Challenges

• Olson discusses the potential new use cases for Valkey, such as multi-primary workloads and SSD support.
• Olson is excited about the potential for multi-primary workloads but acknowledges the complexity involved.
• The challenge of supporting SSDs for Valkey is a concern due to the need to manage flash wear and maintain performance.
• Olson is open to exploring these new use cases and finding solutions to address the challenges.

Madelyn’s Journey with Open Source at AWS

• Olson shares her journey of getting involved with open-source projects at AWS, highlighting the challenges and politics involved.
• Olson emphasizes the importance of proving the business value of open-source contributions.
• AWS’s culture of customer obsession aligns well with open-source contributions, benefiting both AWS users and the open-source community.