Percona announced Valkey-proxy on Oct. 7, 2026, giving enterprises a new open source path from Redis to Valkey. The project is designed to address one of the biggest barriers facing teams that want to make the switch: moving applications from a standalone deployment to a horizontally scaled-out cluster.
Valkey-proxy is being developed by Percona engineers and has been accepted as an official project under Valkey. Percona provides open source database software, support, and services. The company says the project will help companies move complex Redis deployments to a fully open source stack while making minimal changes to their applications.
That promise focuses on a practical problem. Valkey supports both standalone mode and cluster mode, but applications built for one mode do not always work the same way in the other. Teams that begin with a single Valkey instance can rely on multi-key commands, keyspace scanning, and pub/sub capabilities that behave differently in cluster mode.
The missing bridge between standalone and cluster deployments
Valkey is a high-performance, in-memory key-value data store used for caching and database workloads where speed is essential. Its standalone mode can support applications that expect to communicate with one instance, while cluster mode spreads the workload across multiple instances.
That move from one instance to many has often required teams to rewrite parts of their applications. The application may depend on communication patterns or commands that do not transfer cleanly to a cluster. For an enterprise with a complex Redis deployment, that rewrite can become the point where a planned migration stops.
Valkey-proxy is designed to remove that step. It sits between the application and Valkey instances, manages communication, and presents a cluster to the application as a single standalone deployment. The application can keep using the interface it was built for while the proxy handles communication with the Valkey back end.
The project also pools backend connections. That keeps connection counts bounded as applications scale, which gives teams a way to manage communication between applications and the Valkey instances behind the proxy.
Why the project matters for enterprise migration
Many enterprises want to move to Valkey, but without a standard open source proxy, they cannot. Kyle Davis, General Manager for Valkey at Percona, described the choice facing those teams: stay on commercial Redis, which is expensive to license and run, or move to a cloud provider’s managed service.
“Many enterprises want to move to Valkey, but without a standard open source proxy, they can’t,” Davis said.
Valkey-proxy is meant to create another option. Instead of remaining on commercial Redis or handing the deployment to a cloud provider’s managed service, companies can use an open source proxy layer to support a move to Valkey. The goal is not only to help teams leave Redis, but also to make communication between Valkey instances simpler for teams already using Valkey.
“Valkey-proxy gives teams on commercial Redis a clear way to migrate, and it makes communication between instances simpler for teams already running Valkey,” Davis said.
That makes the proxy relevant to two groups. Teams on commercial Redis can use it as part of a migration path, while teams already running Valkey can use its communication layer as they scale from standalone deployments to clusters.
Open source release and testing timeline
Valkey-proxy will be fully open source. Percona plans to publish the code in mid-October 2026 under the BSD-3-Clause license, followed by a public feedback and testing period.
General availability is targeted for early 2027. That timing gives developers and enterprises a period to test the project, provide feedback, and assess how it handles applications that depend on standalone Valkey behavior.
The release does not remove every part of a migration. Companies still need to move their deployments and test their applications, while teams must understand how their workloads use features such as multi-key commands, keyspace scanning, and pub/sub. Valkey-proxy targets the application rewrite that has made the transition harder.
For enterprises weighing the cost of commercial Redis against a move to Valkey, that distinction matters. A proxy that presents a cluster as a standalone deployment can preserve the way an application communicates while the data store scales behind it. Percona’s project is aimed at making that approach available through a fully open source stack.
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