Valkey for
Magento
Magento 2.4.9 swapped Redis for Valkey 9 as its official cache and session store. Here is what that actually means for your shop, in plain English, with no server jargon. Part of the EveryHost Magento 2.4 hosting UK stack.
First, what does a cache actually do for a shop?
Think of your Magento store as a very thorough shop assistant. Every time a visitor asks for a page, that assistant walks to the stockroom, checks the price list, checks which categories the product belongs to, checks the tax rules, checks whether there is a promotion on, then walks back and reads the answer out. Accurate, but slow. Now imagine a thousand people asking at once.
A cache is the notepad the assistant keeps in their pocket. The first person asks, the assistant does the long walk, and writes the answer down. The next nine hundred and ninety nine people get the answer straight off the notepad. Same answer, a fraction of the effort.
Valkey is that notepad. It keeps everything in memory rather than on disk, which is why the answer comes back in a blink. Valkey describes itself as scaling to millions of operations per second with microsecond latency, which is a technical way of saying the notepad never becomes the bottleneck.
Without a cache the store rebuilds the answer every time. With Valkey the answer is already waiting.
And what are sessions?
A session is the store's memory of one shopper. It is what keeps three items in the basket while they carry on browsing, what keeps them logged in between pages, and what holds their half-finished checkout while they go and find their card.
Store those sessions as files on a disk and a busy Friday evening turns into a queue, with shoppers waiting on each other. Store them in memory, which is what Valkey does, and the queue disappears. This is why sessions are the part of the stack nobody notices until it goes wrong, and then everybody notices at once.
So what is Valkey, and why did it replace Redis?
For years, Magento used Redis for exactly these jobs. Two things changed. Redis 7.2 reached end of support, and Redis changed its software licence. For a platform like Magento, a licence change is not a small detail: Adobe has to be certain that every merchant, agency and hosting provider can keep using the component freely.
Valkey is the answer to that. It is an open source, BSD licensed, high-performance key/value datastore stewarded by the Linux Foundation. It began as a fork and, in its own words, includes certain 3-Clause BSD-licensed Redis code from Redis Ltd. So it is not a rewrite from scratch, it is the same lineage carried forward under an open licence.
Adobe's 2.4.9 release notes list Valkey 9.x, with comprehensive support introduced in Adobe Commerce 2.4.9. The same requirement applies to Magento Open Source 2.4.9.
Your configuration stays put. The engine underneath it is what changes.
The three jobs Valkey does in Magento
It is one piece of software doing three separate jobs, all of which your shoppers feel even though none of them are visible.
Cache storage
The store's working memory. Prices, category rules, layout and configuration are worked out once and kept ready, so the same question is not asked of the database over and over.
Session storage
The bit that remembers your shoppers. Their basket contents, their login, what they were part-way through. Sessions in memory means no slow file locking when the shop gets busy.
L2 cache
A second, closer layer of cache sitting in front of the main one, so the most-used values are found even faster. In 2.4.9 and later this uses a Symfony L2 cache, which reduces disk I/O and memory and network overhead.
What you actually gain
Valkey is not a magic speed switch. Both Redis and Valkey are in-memory stores, so raw lookups were already fast. The real gains Adobe points to are about what happens when your store is under pressure, which is exactly when it matters.
In shop terms, all three come down to the same thing: your store holds its shape on the busiest day of the year rather than on the quietest. If you want the wider picture of how caching and search fit together, see our Redis and OpenSearch for Magento explainer.
Careful: "it still works" is not the same as "it is supported"
This is the part that trips people up, so it is worth being precise. Because Valkey and Redis speak the same protocol, an existing Redis setup will generally keep functioning on 2.4.9. Nothing dramatic falls over on day one.
That is not the same as being supported. Adobe's implementation playbook is explicit: Redis cache is not supported for Adobe Commerce 2.4.9, or for patch releases later than 2.4.5-p16, 2.4.6-p14, 2.4.7-p9, and 2.4.8-p4.
Practically, that means a store still running Redis on 2.4.9 sits outside the tested and supported configuration. If something odd happens with caching or sessions, you are the first person to have seen it, and neither Adobe nor your extension vendors are obliged to help. That is a poor position for a shop that takes money.
Do you need to do anything?
The short version: this is a hosting change, not a shop change. Valkey lives on the server. It is not an extension you install, not a setting in your admin, and not something your theme touches. Nobody needs to retrain, and your product data is untouched.
Valkey and Magento: your questions answered
What is Valkey in Magento?
Valkey is the memory store Magento uses to keep the answers it has already worked out, and to remember who each shopper is. In Magento it handles three jobs: cache storage, session storage (baskets and logins), and the L2 cache. It is an open source, BSD licensed key/value datastore stewarded by the Linux Foundation, and it is the officially supported cache and session store for Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce 2.4.9.
Why did Magento 2.4.9 replace Redis with Valkey?
Two reasons. Redis 7.2 reached end of support, and Redis changed its software licence. Valkey is a fork that includes certain 3-Clause BSD-licensed Redis code from Redis Ltd, kept open source under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation. Adobe's 2.4.9 release notes list Valkey 9.x with comprehensive support introduced in Adobe Commerce 2.4.9.
Does Redis still work with Magento 2.4.9?
Technically it usually still runs, because Valkey and Redis speak the same protocol and existing Redis configuration generally continues to work. But Adobe no longer lists Redis as supported. Adobe's implementation playbook states that Redis cache is not supported for Adobe Commerce 2.4.9, or for patch releases later than 2.4.5-p16, 2.4.6-p14, 2.4.7-p9, and 2.4.8-p4. Staying on Redis therefore puts your store outside the supported configuration, which matters if you ever need Adobe support or an extension vendor to help.
Do I need to do anything as a store owner?
On EveryHost, no. The cache and session store lives on the server, not in your store's admin or your theme, so the change is a hosting job rather than a shop job. We move you from Redis to Valkey as part of managed hosting and as part of any migration onto our platform. If you are hosted elsewhere, ask your host whether they run Valkey 9 and when they plan to move you.
Will my customers lose their baskets or get logged out?
They should not. Sessions are the part of the store that remembers a shopper's basket and login, so the swap is done carefully and at a quiet time. Because Valkey is protocol compatible with Redis, the store's configuration does not have to be rewritten, which is what makes the change low risk rather than a rebuild.
Is Valkey faster than Redis for a Magento store?
The honest answer is that the gains come from features rather than a dramatic raw speed jump, because both are in-memory stores measured in microseconds. Adobe highlights a stale cache feature that serves cached values while a new value is being regenerated, reducing cache stampedes and lock contention; read-only replica connections that distribute read traffic more effectively and reduce load on the primary; an L2 cache that auto-clears at a configurable threshold, 95% by default, to prevent memory exhaustion; and a Symfony L2 cache in 2.4.9 and later that reduces disk I/O along with memory and network overhead.
What version of Valkey does Magento 2.4.9 need?
Valkey 9.x. Adobe's 2.4.9 release notes describe comprehensive support for Valkey 9.x introduced in Adobe Commerce 2.4.9, and the same requirement applies to Magento Open Source 2.4.9.
Already running the Magento 2.4.9 stack
Valkey, OpenSearch 3, PHP 8.4 and Varnish 8, provisioned to Adobe's reference architecture on single-tenant UK hardware. We move you off Redis, you carry on selling.