ValkeyConf 2026

A year ago at Valkey Keyspace in Amsterdam, a group of us stood in a hallway comparing notes on running Valkey on Kubernetes. None of the operators we'd tried supported all the deployment models Valkey has to offer. By the end of the conversation we'd agreed the community needed an operator that did, one that's fully community-driven and endorsed by the Valkey org itself... so we decided to make one!

This talk is what happened in the year since. We'll show what the valkey-operator does today: declare a ValkeyCluster, and the operator handles topology, role management, rolling updates, and recovery. We'll also share what a year of building an operator in the open has taught us.

Most operators have to work around their database. An official one gets a seat at the table to change it. We'll cover the year-two roadmap, plus the conversations underway with Valkey core maintainers on making Valkey itself more cloud native: cgroup awareness to unlock dynamic vertical autoscaling, and module support that's easy to configure.

If you run Valkey on Kubernetes, or want a say in what an official operator becomes, this talk is your invitation to help shape year two.