Generally Available: Valkey 8.0.0

The first ever release of Valkey, 7.2.5, became generally available more than 5 months ago. While the initial release was a milestone, it focused on compatibility and license continuity; bringing no new features to the table. Today marks a different milestone for the Valkey project: the first major release. Valkey 8.0.0 continues the traditions of the seven major versions of Redis that precede it by bringing improvements to speed and efficiency alongside new features.

Key properties of the Valkey project are transparency and collaboration. As a consequence of Valkey 8.0.0 being developed entirely in the open, the team has already written about both the big and small features of the release. The best overview is the RC1 blog which breaks down all the changes and features in the release into a few sections: performance, reliability, replication, observability, and efficiency. Additionally, there are deep dives on the speed (with a follow up) and efficiency improvements in Valkey 8.0.0.

While this is a major version, Valkey takes command set compatibility seriously: Valkey 8.0.0 makes no backwards incompatible changes to the existing command syntax or their responses. Your existing tools and custom software will be able to immediately take advantage of Valkey 8.0.0. Since Valkey 8.0.0 does make some small changes to previously undefined behaviors, it's wise to read the release notes. Additionally, because this version makes changes in how the software uses threading, you may want to re-evaluate your cluster’s infrastructure to achieve the highest performance.

Valkey 8.0.0 has gone through multiple rounds of release candidates, testing, and verification. The Technical Steering Committee considers it ready for production usage. You can build from source, start installing the binaries, or deploy the containers today. Expect package managers to pick up the latest version in the coming days.

Note: Valkey 8.0.1 was released on October 2, read the release notes on GitHub.

About the authors

Kyle Davis

Kyle is the Senior Developer Advocate on the Valkey project. He has a long history with open source software development; he was a founding contributor to the OpenSearch project and most recently worked to build a community around Bottlerocket OS. When not working, Kyle enjoys 3D printing and getting his hands dirty in his Edmonton, Alberta-based home garden.

Kyle has written over 70 technology-related blog posts, tutorials, and bylines, published a book on microservice architectures, been a guest on more than a dozen podcasts, and presented at over 20 different conferences around the world (and too many meetups to list). He presents on a diverse range of topics such as open source software, data structures, 3D modelling, operating systems, and embedded electronics.

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