Percona releases Valkey-proxy to simplify migration to Valkey Clusters

Valkey's Origin and Evolution

Valkey emerged as an open-source fork of Redis in 2024, following Redis's change from a permissive BSD license to proprietary, source-available alternatives. Despite Redis later adding an AGPLv3 license option in 2025, Valkey continued its development path, focusing on independent governance and permissive licensing. Since its inception, Valkey has reduced memory requirements, introduced new cluster management and access-control features, and integrated AI agents for maintenance tasks.

Addressing Migration Challenges

Redis is an in-memory data store used for caching. Many applications were designed to interact with Redis as a single instance. Migrating these applications to a distributed Valkey Cluster often requires code changes to handle multiple nodes, routing, and command differences. Commercial Redis products and some cloud services use proxy layers to manage this, but an open-source equivalent for self-hosted Valkey deployments was previously unavailable.

Percona's Solution: Valkey-proxy

Percona, an open-source database software and services company, has released Valkey-proxy to fill this gap. Valkey-proxy is an open-source tool that allows existing applications to connect to a Valkey Cluster without needing to be rewritten. This proxy aims to remove a significant blocker for wider Valkey adoption, particularly for organizations migrating from single-instance Redis deployments.

Impact on Valkey Adoption

Kyle Davis, general manager for the Redis/Valkey ecosystem at Percona, stated that the need to rewrite applications for clustered Valkey deployments has been one of the last major hurdles to broader adoption. Percona, which also supports technologies like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB, is one of the companies backing the Valkey project, alongside AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle.