Managed Valkey

Why Valkey and not Redis

Redis left its BSD licence in 2024 for terms written to stop clouds from offering it as a service. The maintainers who disagreed forked the last open version, the Linux Foundation took the fork in, and it is called Valkey. Most of the ecosystem, and most of the Linux distributions, went with it.

We could not offer Redis under those terms without a commercial agreement with one company, and a small European cloud does not get that agreement on terms it would want to pass on to you. So we did not pretend otherwise: we run the open fork, we say so on the page, and what you pay for is the machine rather than somebody's licensing strategy.

For your code this is a non-event. The protocol is the same, the commands are the same, and the client you already import connects to the URL we hand you exactly as it did before.

import { createClient } from "npm:redis";

// The library is still called redis. Only the server changed.
const cache = createClient({ url: Deno.env.get("CACHE_URL") });
await cache.connect();

export default {
  async fetch(request: Request) {
    const key = new URL(request.url).pathname;
    const hit = await cache.get(key);
    if (hit) return new Response(hit);

    const fresh = await render(key);
    await cache.set(key, fresh, { EX: 60 });
    return new Response(fresh);
  },
};

What you get

Like every database here, it is a project-level resource. You create one, link it to the services that should reach it, and the name you give the link becomes the environment variable prefix: CACHE arrives as CACHE_URL. Nothing listens on the public internet, and a link cannot cross into another project.

As a cache

Set a TTL and forget it. This is the shape most projects want, and the one that survives a restart best: anything you can rebuild from the database costs nothing to lose.

As a queue or a lock

Lists, streams and SET NX work exactly as they do in Redis. Keep in mind that a restart is a real event for data you cannot rebuild, and design the job to be retried.

As a rate limiter

A counter with an expiry, next to the service that increments it, which is a short hop rather than a trip across the internet.

What it is good at, and what it is not

What it costs

It counts against the same database allowance as the other engines. There is no separate cache product and no per-command billing to model.

• Free, €010 databases, 50 MB each
• Pro, €19 a month10 databases, 5 GB each
• Business, €99 a month50 databases, 20 GB each

Questions people ask about it

The other two