Valkey or Redis: how I'd actually choose
Short version, because you’ve got a cluster to babysit: run Valkey. The exception is if you need vector search living in the same box as your cache — then look hard at Redis 8 and read the license before you commit. That’s the post. Everything under here is me showing my work. I run Valkey in prod. It’s the cache and rate-limit store in front of an LLM gateway, and the ingestion queue for a tracing stack, on AKS. So this isn’t a hot take about open-source ethics from someone who’s never had to kubectl rollout restart the thing at 1am. The ethics argument is over and you still have to ship something — this is about that part. ...