When You Have to Fork a Project: All About Valkey

Open at Intel

In this episode, Madelyn Olson, a maintainer of the Valkey project and an AWS engineer, joins us to discuss the life of an open source maintainer and the experiences surrounding the launch of the Valkey project. We cover the pivotal moments that led to the creation of Valkey, a Redis fork, following the Redis license change. Madelyn also shares insights on the challenges and pressures of being a maintainer, strategies to manage burnout, and the significance of creating a community-driven, open source project. The episode highlights the technical advancements and future directions for Valkey, working to leverage modern hardware, manage large clusters, and expand the extension ecosystem.

00:00 Introduction

00:48 Redis License Change and Birth of Valkey

06:17 Maintainer Life and Burnout

14:54 Forking a Repository: When and Why

19:30 Community-Driven Open Source Projects

21:32 Future of Valkey and Closing Remarks

Guest: Madelyn Olson is a co-creator and maintainer of Valkey, a high-performance key-value datastore, and Principal Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS). She focuses on building secure and highly reliable features, with a passion in working with open-source communities.