Description
Replace Redict with Valkey as the in-memory cache and message broker service across the entire Guardian stack.
Motivation
Both Redict and Valkey emerged in March 2024 as open-source forks of Redis 7.2.4 after Redis Ltd. relicensed the project under restrictive SSPL/RSALv2 terms. However, the two forks have taken very different trajectories since then.
Redict is a single-maintainer project with minimal community traction and limited development activity, its last release was a security-only patch in January 2025 with no functional updates beyond the initial fork.
Valkey, by contrast, became the dominant community-backed alternative. It is hosted by the Linux Foundation under the permissive BSD 3-Clause license and is backed by AWS, Google Cloud, and roughly 50 contributing organizations. The 8.x series introduced multi-threaded I/O improvements and is in production at major cloud providers. It is wire-protocol compatible with Redis and Redict, requiring no changes to Guardian's application code or configuration.
Switching to Valkey aligns Guardian's infrastructure with the open-source Redis successor that has the healthiest long-term outlook.
Definition of done
- All docker compose files updated with new image
- All GitHub Actions workflows are using new image
- Documentation updated to reflect the Valkey usage
Description
Replace Redict with Valkey as the in-memory cache and message broker service across the entire Guardian stack.
Motivation
Both Redict and Valkey emerged in March 2024 as open-source forks of Redis 7.2.4 after Redis Ltd. relicensed the project under restrictive SSPL/RSALv2 terms. However, the two forks have taken very different trajectories since then.
Redict is a single-maintainer project with minimal community traction and limited development activity, its last release was a security-only patch in January 2025 with no functional updates beyond the initial fork.
Valkey, by contrast, became the dominant community-backed alternative. It is hosted by the Linux Foundation under the permissive BSD 3-Clause license and is backed by AWS, Google Cloud, and roughly 50 contributing organizations. The 8.x series introduced multi-threaded I/O improvements and is in production at major cloud providers. It is wire-protocol compatible with Redis and Redict, requiring no changes to Guardian's application code or configuration.
Switching to Valkey aligns Guardian's infrastructure with the open-source Redis successor that has the healthiest long-term outlook.
Definition of done