Percona's Valkey-proxy aims to ease migration from Redis without code rewrites
An open source proxy layer from database vendor Percona will let applications built for single-instance Redis connect to distributed Valkey clusters without modification. The tool addresses what some see as the final major barrier to wider Valkey adoption.
When Redis shifted to proprietary licensing in 2024, moving away from its BSD license, the community fractured. The Linux Foundation responded by launching Valkey, a permissively licensed fork that has since gained backing from major cloud providers and database vendors. Yet one significant obstacle has persisted for organizations considering the switch: applications originally designed to work with Redis as a single instance often cannot simply be pointed at a distributed Valkey Cluster without substantial code changes.
Percona, an open source database software and services company supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB, is now attempting to remove that barrier with Valkey-proxy. The tool functions as a transparent intermediary between applications and Valkey Cluster deployments, allowing legacy code to operate unchanged. Percona itself is among the backers of the Valkey project, alongside AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle.
Closing the proxy gap
Redis operates as an in-memory data store optimized for rapid access in caching and similar use cases. Many applications were constructed to treat Redis as a single node, handling all interactions through a unified interface. Transitioning those same applications to a clustered Valkey environment typically requires rewriting them to manage multiple nodes, handle routing logic, and account for behavioral differences in certain commands. Commercial Redis offerings and some managed cloud services have long offered proxy layers to solve this problem, but organizations running Valkey independently have lacked equivalent tooling.
Kyle Davis, general manager for the Redis/Valkey ecosystem at Percona, characterized the rewriting requirement as one of the final major obstacles to broader Valkey adoption. "Right now there's not really any good open source solution for this, and so there's been this gap," Davis said in an interview at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit Europe in Prague.
While other proxy solutions exist, Davis noted that alternatives like Envoy lack full comprehension of the Valkey protocol and cannot handle all operations that Valkey supports. This limitation has left some organizations trapped between aging applications designed around a single Redis instance and the clustered Valkey infrastructure they would require as they scale. Valkey-proxy is intended to bridge that gap. "Now we can address a whole different layer of applications that really didn't have a good option," Davis said.
Development and deployment timeline
Percona built the initial version of Valkey-proxy internally but intends to transition it into the broader Valkey project before expanding development to the wider community. "From there, we're going to get a lot of contributions from Percona's customers, customers from other places, and independent developers," Davis explained.
The proxy holds particular significance for organizations managing their own infrastructure, including on-premises deployments. Davis identified the potential user base as spanning smaller companies with constrained resources to large financial services firms with stringent compliance mandates—entities requiring greater sovereignty over data infrastructure placement and operation.
Beyond its immediate function, Valkey-proxy could serve as a foundation for additional capabilities within the Valkey ecosystem. "It provides a decoupling layer that in the future we can build other components into," Davis said. "Filling that missing gap allows us to have more flexibility, and now we can start doing things in a different way."
Percona secured approval in late September to incorporate Valkey-proxy into the Valkey project. The company is now transferring code from internal repositories to the public project, with a target of making all source code available by the end of October. A release candidate is planned for December, with general availability expected by early 2027.
The months ahead will be crucial for identifying edge cases as users test the proxy against their own applications. Freshworks will be among the first organizations to do so, already collaborating with Percona as an early user and design partner. "That's going to be a great test case for it," Davis said.