VMware® Tanzu® Platform offers customers a rich set of production ready data service offerings for modern applications as part of the platform. Core data services included in Tanzu Platform offer enterprise-grade data management, security, data resiliency, and disaster recovery capabilities. In this blog, we focus on the new Tanzu for Valkey on Cloud Foundry 4.0 (previously known as Tanzu Redis for Cloud Foundry).
What is Valkey?
ValkeyTM is an easy-to-use high-speed key-value store. It is an in-memory solution that supports caching and messaging for applications. It supports a range of data structures including strings, lists, hashes, sets, bitmaps, HyperLogLogs, geospatial indexes, streams, and more. It is easy to install and configure and is popular with application developers.
Valkey: The drop-in replacement for Redis on Cloud Foundry
Earlier this year, Redis announced a change to their licensing terms for all versions starting with 7.4. As a result, the open source software community has embraced Valkey, a fork of Redis, to address potential use restrictions. Consequently, VMware Tanzu is also embracing Valkey in favor of its predecessor offering VMware Tanzu for Redis on Cloud Foundry. The latest release v4.0.0 packages the Valkey engine instead of Redis engine, enabling business continuity for current Tanzu customers.Tanzu for Valkey on Cloud Foundry packages Valkey for deployment and operability on bosh VMs that comprise Cloud Foundry deployments.
Tanzu for Valkey on Cloud Foundry can be made available to application development teams as an on-demand service or a shared-VM service.
- On-demand service – The platform engineer can set up plans with different configurations, memory sizes and quotas. App developers can provision an instance for any of the On-demand plans offered, with some flexibility on configuration of certain settings.
- Shared-VM service – This option provides support for a number of Valkey instances running in a single VM, and is intended for testing and development use-cases. Tanzu does not recommend using this option in production environments. Shared-VM instances are pre-provisioned by the platform engineer with a fixed number of instances and memory size. App developers can then use one of these pre-provisioned instances.
High-Availability and seamless Redis to Valkey Migration
Valkey offers parity with Redis 7.4. For example, Valkey leverages Redis sentinel to support high-availability configurations for critical workloads, as well. VMware Tanzu customers who are currently using VMware Tanzu for Redis on Cloud Foundry tile can simply upgrade to VMware Tanzu for Valkey on Cloud Foundry tile. The only visible change for Tanzu customers will be the tile name change on the Operations Manager UI. Since the service name will stay the same, upgrading current Redis deployments on Cloud Foundry to Valkey should be a simple upgrade experience.
As always, Tanzu Platform Engineers can also opt-in to upgrade their entire fleet of Redis instances while upgrading to the latest version of the tile on their Operations Manager, thus making the Redis to Valkey switch invisible to application developers.
Next Steps
Ready to take the next step? Read more about Tanzu for Valkey here. Explore our resources, join our weekly Cloud Foundry podcasts, and start planning your upgrade to the latest Tanzu Platform version today. For personalized assistance and expert guidance, contact us.
