NetApp is excited to announce our plan to offer a fully managed service and enterprise support for the Valkey Project. 

With the recent decision by Redis Ltd. to remove distribution under the 3-Clause BSD licence and replace it with a restrictive Server Side Public License (SSPL), Redis™ is no longer recognized as open source. This means that organizations using Redis are no longer guaranteed to run it without restrictions and open the risk of future licence changes (Redis had previously committed to remaining fully open). We recommend that customers begin planning a migration now while the 2 projects remain highly compatible (effectively the same code base).

A truly open source project, Valkey has taken up the mantle of being the premier open source in-memory data store. Valkey is created by former Redis committers and has the support of the Linux Foundation as well as many community members and corporate partners.  

We believe that Valkey is the obvious choice for customers currently running Redis. Valkey retains 2 out of 3 of the original corporate maintainers of Redis, keeps the open source license, and continues with single-threaded C to ensure maximum compatibility. Below is a comparison of alternatives considered: 

Typically, after this kind of licence change, we have seen companies such as Elastic and Mongo increase investment in their closed-source offerings at the expense of the “community” version while also losing outside contributors to the readable-code versions.

We recommend customers plan to migrate within 12 months while the products remain highly compatible, and switching costs are minimal. The forks are likely to diverge in features and compatibility over time which will increase switching costs. For NetApp Instaclustr Managed Platform customers, we will work to perform the migration at a time that is convenient to you. 

With this announcement, NetApp is beginning the process of retiring support for Redis on the Instaclustr Managed Platform. There is no immediate change, as the new licence prohibiting managed service only applies to future versions of Redis. Security patches and support will continue for the near future. 

For customers who choose to manage their own environment, Instaclustr Enterprise Support for Valkey is available now to help you plan your migration. Customers can also expect us to retire support for Redis 24 months after our launch of Valkey on the Instaclustr Platform. We will of course work with you if you choose to transition your clusters to Valkey. 

We will be reaching out to all our customers individually to discuss this development with you, but if you have any questions in the meantime then please feel free to contact [email protected].