Percona is developing Valkey-proxy, an open-source proxy designed to address one of the main obstacles to migrating legacy applications from Redis to Valkey clusters. The idea is to place an intermediary layer between the application and the Valkey cluster, allowing applications that assume the presence of a single Redis instance to continue operating without extensive code changes to handle multiple nodes, routing, and differences in certain commands.
Why was the proxy needed?
Redis’s licensing change in 2024, from the permissive BSD license to source-available proprietary alternatives, led to a major split in the project’s community. Days later, the Linux Foundation launched the Valkey project as an open-source fork. Although Redis later added the AGPLv3 license as an open-source option in 2025, Valkey continued on its path with independent governance and a different license.
Many applications use Redis as an in-memory data store for caching and workloads that require fast access. However, moving an application built around a single instance to Valkey Cluster typically requires understanding multiple nodes, routing mechanisms, and the behavior of certain commands. Commercial Redis products and some cloud services provide proxy layers for this task, but users who manage Valkey themselves have, according to Percona, lacked an equivalent open-source option.
What does Valkey-proxy provide?
The proxy aims to hide the cluster’s complexities from the application, allowing existing applications to connect to a Valkey cluster without being rewritten to handle multiple nodes directly. Kyle Davis, general manager of the Redis and Valkey ecosystem at Percona, said that the absence of a suitable open-source solution was one of the last major obstacles to broader Valkey adoption.
Davis noted that other tools, such as Envoy, do not fully understand the Valkey protocol or manage connections in a way that supports all of the project’s capabilities. Valkey-proxy therefore targets a layer of legacy applications that fall between reliance on a single Redis instance and the need for a scalable clustered architecture.
Who benefits, and what are the limits of the plan?
The project could benefit companies that manage their own infrastructure, including on-premises environments, ranging from small organizations with limited resources to financial services institutions that need greater control over where their data infrastructure operates and over compliance requirements.
Percona developed the first version internally, but in late September it received approval to bring Valkey-proxy into the Valkey project and move the code from private repositories to the public project. The source code is planned to be made fully available before the end of October 2026, followed by a candidate release in December, with general availability expected in early 2027.
Freshworks will be among the early users, working with Percona as an early adopter and design partner to identify edge cases during testing. Contributions from major cloud companies such as AWS also remain a possibility, not a publicly announced commitment.
Editorial analysis: What changes in practice?
Valkey-proxy is not itself introducing a new database alternative; rather, it reduces the cost of the architectural transition from a single-instance Redis model to Valkey Cluster. Its importance lies in addressing application compatibility, a practical problem that can be more complex than replacing the database engine itself. However, the project is still pre-general availability; real-world testing will therefore determine how extensively it covers different commands and application behaviors, while compatibility and performance quality, as well as community contributions, will remain open questions until the public releases arrive.