ValkeyConf 2026

ValkeyConf 2026

5 October 2026 | Prague, Czechia
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09:00 CEST

Welcome & Opening Remarks

Monday October 5, 2026 09:00 - 09:10 CEST

Chamber Hall, Level 3

Monday October 5, 2026 09:00 - 09:10 CEST
Chamber Hall, Level 3

Keynote Sessions

09:10 CEST

Keynote Sessions to be Announced

Monday October 5, 2026 09:10 - 09:50 CEST

Chamber Hall, Level 3

Monday October 5, 2026 09:10 - 09:50 CEST
Chamber Hall, Level 3

Keynote Sessions

09:50 CEST

One Year From the Hallway: The State of the Valkey Operator - Joe Heyburn, Braze & Björn Svensson, Ericsson

Monday October 5, 2026 09:50 - 10:20 CEST

Chamber Hall, Level 3

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.

Speakers

Joe Heyburn

Staff Engineer, Braze

Joe is a technical lead across In-Memory Databases and Observability teams at Braze, during a pivotal period of high growth for the company. Managing databases such as Valkey on Kubernetes, unlocking its performance to allow it to scale with Braze, while creating tooling to aid in... Read More →

Björn Svensson

Open Software Developer, Ericsson

Björn Svensson is an Open Source Developer at Ericsson with over 20 years of experience in the telecom industry, dedicating the last 6 years exclusively to open source development across a wide range of projects. He is a maintainer of Valkey clients and active in the valkey-operator... Read More →

Monday October 5, 2026 09:50 - 10:20 CEST
Chamber Hall, Level 3

Ecosystem/Integrations

Audience Level Intermediate

10:20 CEST

Beyond Throughput: Production Lessons From Running Write-Heavy Valkey Clusters - Shuva Jyoti Kar, Palo Alto Networks & Aditi Gupta, Disney+ Hotstar

Monday October 5, 2026 10:20 - 10:50 CEST

Chamber Hall, Level 3

Synthetic benchmarks measure how fast Valkey can run. Production measures how long it remains predictable, and those are different questions.
Under sustained, high-volume write ingestion, as in a production-scale CDC pipeline, raw throughput is rarely the limiting factor. Instead, clusters become unstable when replication falls behind during resharding, memory amplification exhausts available headroom before eviction recovers capacity, or failover triggers large-scale reconnect storms.
These failure modes rarely appear in benchmark reports, but they're often responsible for production outages.
Using a production-scale CDC workload as the reference system, we'll investigate how Valkey behaves under sustained write load, exploring:

* Why is replication an early warning signal of cluster instability?
* How do resharding, replica promotion, and failover interact under write load?
* Why adding replicas doesn't always improve resilience.
* The operational signals and metrics that reveal instability before users do.

You'll leave with practical heuristics for capacity planning, shard sizing, observability, failover testing, and operating Valkey clusters under sustained write pressure.

Speakers

Shuva Jyoti Kar

Principal Engineer, Palo Alto Networks

Shuva is a Principal Engineer at Palo Alto Networks, architecting secure enterprise AI platforms. An open-source contributor and author of the upcoming books: Engineering the Data Agent Control Plane (O'Reilly), Agent Skills in Action (Manning), and The Agentic Mind(Apress), his work... Read More →

Aditi Gupta

Software Engineer II, Disney+ Hotstar

Aditi Gupta is a Software Engineer II at Disney+ Hotstar, where she builds and operates distributed backend systems powering one of the world's largest streaming platforms (72M+ peak concurrent viewers) . Her work focuses on distributed systems, production reliability, observability... Read More →

Monday October 5, 2026 10:20 - 10:50 CEST
Chamber Hall, Level 3

Audience Level Intermediate

10:50 CEST

Measuring Valkey Saturation With Active-Time and Eventloop Metrics in 9.1 - Himanshu Sangshetti, Mem0

Monday October 5, 2026 10:50 - 11:20 CEST

Chamber Hall, Level 3

Your Valkey server reports 100% CPU. Is it saturated? You cannot tell from that number, and it isn't a monitoring bug.

Valkey's main thread and I/O threads busy-wait for work. A thread waiting burns CPU exactly like a thread working. In one reported case, throughput swept from 217K to 452K QPS- a 2x increase, while main-thread CPU sat flat near 100% the entire way and total CPU pinned at 400%. Every alert, dashboard and autoscaling policy built on that number is reading noise.

Valkey 9.1 shipped the answer: used_active_time_main_thread and used_active_time_io_thread_N, measuring wall clock minus busy-wait and blocking epoll, on a monotonic clock so spare capacity is actually visible.

This session builds a real saturation signal out of INFO:
1. active-time deltas for true per-thread utilization
2. eventloop_duration_sum minus eventloop_duration_cmd_sum to separate I/O from command execution
3. latencystats percentiles to catch what averages hide

Then we tune I/O thread count against it and ship the result with log-format json.

You will leave able to answer "how much headroom do I have?" and to retire the CPU alert that was never going to tell you.

Speakers

Himanshu Sangshetti

Member of Technical Staff (MTS), Mem0

Himanshu Sangshetti is an MTS at Mem0 (60k+ Github stars).

With a background in AI, cloud, and DevOps, he builds the memory layer for AI agents and helps engineers design and operate them in production.

An AWS Community Builder, HashiCorp Ambassador, and former AWS Cloud Capt... Read More →

Monday October 5, 2026 10:50 - 11:20 CEST
Chamber Hall, Level 3

Audience Level Intermediate

11:50 CEST

No Client Changes Required: Making Existing Workloads Faster With Less RAM - Rain Valentine, Amazon

Monday October 5, 2026 11:50 - 12:10 CEST

Chamber Hall, Level 3

For most Valkey deployments, the first wall you hit isn't CPU, it's memory capacity. So what if simply upgrading gave a large fraction of that memory back — with no client changes, no re-sharding, no application rewrites?

This talk goes behind the scenes on the memory-efficiency work that has quietly reshaped Valkey since its earliest releases. Measured on the same hardware across successive versions, per-key overhead has fallen roughly 35–60% across every core data type — strings, hashes, sets, and sorted sets. We'll take a single key apart to see exactly where its memory goes, then watch each of those costs shrink or disappear from one Valkey version to the next. Two ground-up rewrites anchor the story: a cache-friendly hashtable, and the new B+tree-based sorted set that drives per-element cost lower still. A theme runs throughout: on modern hardware, smaller data is usually faster data, because these workloads are bound by memory and cache, not compute.

Expect concrete numbers, under-the-hood analysis, and a clear picture of what the savings mean in practice — more data per node, fewer nodes, and a smaller bill — all delivered transparently, just by staying current.

Speakers

Rain Valentine

Valkey Contributor, Amazon

Rain Valentine is a Valkey contributor working on core data structures and performance. Her 50+ Valkey commits include a B+ tree ordered index for sorted sets, improvements to the core hashtable, and string storage. She works on performance characterization across ARM, AMD, and Intel... Read More →

Monday October 5, 2026 11:50 - 12:10 CEST
Chamber Hall, Level 3

Audience Level Intermediate

12:10 CEST

Where Did All My Memory Go? Tuning Valkey Memory Usage at Scale - Edith Puclla & Hieu Nguyen, Percona

Monday October 5, 2026 12:10 - 12:20 CEST

Chamber Hall, Level 3

Each datatype in Valkey (Hash, List, Set, Sorted Set) can be encoded internally as a different object depending on how many elements a key of those types has in order to balance between the memory footprint and performance.

While this approach suits the majority of Valkey deployments. If your Valkey instances have a large number of keys, a little tuning can significantly reduce your memory footprint.

Through live demonstrations, we'll show how an open source encoding analyzer helps identify optimization opportunities and safely tune Valkey for production deployments.

Speakers

Edith Puclla

Technical Educator, Percona

Edith, a Technical Educator for Valkey at Percona, is a passionate contributor to the world of open source. Throughout her career, she has successfully contributed to the Apache Airflow project during her internship with Outreachy. She is also an Ambassador for the Cloud Native Computing... Read More →

Hieu Nguyen

Database Engineer, Percona

Hieu is a Database Engineer focused on distributed databases, Kubernetes, and real-time data processing. He contributes to the Valkey ecosystem and enjoys building open-source tools, improving database operations, and sharing practical knowledge through technical writing and conference... Read More →

Monday October 5, 2026 12:10 - 12:20 CEST
Chamber Hall, Level 3

Audience Level Intermediate

12:20 CEST

Beyond Fork(): Memory-Efficient Snapshots & Full Sync for Valkey - Jim Brunner, Amazon AWS

Monday October 5, 2026 12:20 - 12:40 CEST

Chamber Hall, Level 3

Why should a 50GB database require 100GB of RAM just to take a backup or sync to a replica? Valkey’s Forkless Save & Sync capabilities decouple data persistence from the memory-intensive forking process, eliminating the memory spikes that lead to out-of-memory (OOM) issues. We will compare traditional fork-based persistence against the new forkless model, highlighting the impact on system resource utilization. Learn how Valkey helps you configure your clusters for true operational stability.

Forkless Save/Sync is one of the most anticipated features coming to Valkey. The talk at Unlocked/Seattle was well regarded. This talk will cover similar material, but will have increased focus on full-sync.

While fork/forkless is a fairly advanced topic, the concepts are introduced with suitable foundation such that beginners will be able to understand the concepts and impacts. The talk is designed to appeal to all audiences, while still capturing the attention of advanced engineers.

Note: I'm answering "no" to "presented this talk before" because I'll be changing some of the content. However, yes, most of it will come from my presentation at Unlocked/Seattle.

Speakers

Jim Brunner

Valkey Maintainer, Amazon AWS

Born in the age of "core memory", Jim has developed software on everything from mainframes to microcontrollers and has coded in dozens of languages. He is passionate about APIs, algorithms, and performance, with a deep respect for maintainability and operational excellence. When not... Read More →

Monday October 5, 2026 12:20 - 12:40 CEST
Chamber Hall, Level 3

Features (Valkey 10.0)

Audience Level Intermediate

12:40 CEST

Beyond Compatibility: Debugging Tail Latency in a Production Valkey Migration - Anyang Li, Booking.com B.V.

Monday October 5, 2026 12:40 - 13:00 CEST

Chamber Hall, Level 3

After a Booking.com accommodation reservation, our post-booking service caches reconstructible reservation and order data for web/mobile journeys. To retire self-managed Redis OSS, we first used ElastiCache for Valkey with cluster mode disabled, retained Jedis to limit scope, and routed reads/writes to the primary for read-after-write consistency. At 10% traffic, cache-read p99 rose ~5→15 ms; at 50%, it reached ~50 ms with ~100 ms spikes, and service-latency compliance fell to ~97%, breaching its 99% SLO. Valkey execution remained 20–30 μs, shifting our investigation beyond the engine.

We then enabled a one-shard, three-AZ cluster and moved to Lettuce 6.6.0 with adaptive and 60-second periodic topology refresh and lowest-latency reads across primary and replicas. We accepted eventual consistency for this reconstructible cache; writes remained primary-routed. These changes cut cache-read p99 ~50→3 ms (~94%), but GraphQL p99 remained ~800 versus ~600 ms. Lock telemetry exposed retry waves and redundant loads; retry jitter and cache rechecks cut contended-lock p99 by ~70% and restored GraphQL p99 to ~610 ms, near its ~600 ms pre-migration baseline, completing the migration.

Speakers

Anyang Li

Software Engineer I, Booking.com B.V.

Anyang Li is a software engineer at Booking.com who builds and operates high-throughput post-booking services. His work focuses on distributed systems, observability, reliability and production performance. He recently worked on a staged Redis OSS-to-Valkey migration, turning its... Read More →

Monday October 5, 2026 12:40 - 13:00 CEST
Chamber Hall, Level 3

Use Cases/Adoption

Audience Level Intermediate

14:25 CEST

Large Scale Redis To Valkey Migration Along With GLIDE - Premkumar Patturaj, Freshworks

Monday October 5, 2026 14:25 - 14:45 CEST

Chamber Hall, Level 3

We run 840+ Redis 7.2.12 instances on AWS EKS serving ~1.64M operations per second. Facing a performance ceiling, fragmented client tooling, and a licensing dead-end after Redis left BSD, we migrated the entire fleet to Valkey 8.1.5 — with zero application code changes and sub-five-minute rollback.
This talk is an evidence-first walkthrough. We'll cover what actually changed under the hood (production-ready I/O threading, Swiss Table memory layout, deterministic cluster failover) versus what stayed identical (wire protocol, data format, client libraries) — the distinction that made a fleet-wide engine swap a defensibly low-risk decision. We'll share the benchmark methodology behind our results — +31% throughput, −33% P99 latency, and 22–41% memory savings, confirmed across three independent tools — plus the blue-green rollout plan for both Sentinel and Cluster deployments.

Speakers

Premkumar Patturaj

Director of Engineering, Freshworks

Have 15 years IT exp and 10 years of Freshworks experience. Works on Relational database and NoSQL's

Monday October 5, 2026 14:25 - 14:45 CEST
Chamber Hall, Level 3

Audience Level Intermediate

14:45 CEST

Why AI Agents Forget: Engineering Memory Systems with Valkey - Sanika Kotgire, ZS Associates

Monday October 5, 2026 14:45 - 15:05 CEST

Chamber Hall, Level 3

LLMs can write code, answer questions, and execute tasks, but they have one major limitation: they forget. Every new conversation starts from scratch unless we explicitly build systems that preserve context, state, and memory.

In this talk, we'll explore what it actually takes to give AI agents memory. Rather than focusing on prompts or models, we'll focus on the infrastructure layer that sits behind them. We'll examine common memory patterns used in agentic systems, including conversation history, session state, semantic caching, user preferences, and long-term knowledge retrieval.

Using Valkey as the foundation, we'll discuss design decisions, trade-offs, and operational challenges such as memory growth, retrieval latency, cache invalidation, and observability. We'll also look at how memory architectures impact both response quality and inference costs.

The goal is not to build another chatbot. The goal is to understand how stateful AI systems are engineered and why memory is becoming one of the most important infrastructure problems in modern AI.

Speakers

Sanika Kotgire

AI Engineer, ZS Associates

I'm an AI Engineer & Data Engineer passionate about building intelligent, scalable, and cloud-native systems. I'm an AWS Community Builder, public speaker, technical writer, and Author of Soaring Brimstone's Flight. I actively organize and lead AI, cloud, and developer-focused... Read More →

Monday October 5, 2026 14:45 - 15:05 CEST
Chamber Hall, Level 3

Use Cases/Adoption

Audience Level Intermediate

15:05 CEST

Caching the LLM Stack: Where Valkey Fits To Cut Latency and Cost - Kristiyan Ivanov, BetterDB

Monday October 5, 2026 15:05 - 15:35 CEST

Chamber Hall, Level 3

Agent workloads make a lot of LLM calls. A surprising number of them are redundant. Every call you serve from cache is latency and money you don't pay for.

There is no single cache, but a stack, and Valkey can fit at every level - from the cheap and brittle to the smart and careful. Exact-match response caching on vanilla Valkey. Embedding caches, the layer most people forget, which saves you from paying to vectorize the same text. Then semantic caching with valkey-search, for queries that mean the same thing but don't match byte-for-byte.

I go deep on semantic because it is where most production setups quietly break. The usual setup is one global similarity threshold for everything, and it can't win: set it loose and you serve confident wrong answers, tighten it and your hit rate collapses to almost nothing, and the worst part is you can't tell which until someone complains about a bad response in production. I will show why, and what works instead: per-category thresholds, confidence bands, and how to check a hit is correct before you trust it.

You don't need to know LLMs to follow along. You will leave knowing which cache solves which problem, and where Valkey fits in each.

Speakers

Kristiyan Ivanov

CTO and Founder, BetterDB

Kristiyan is Founder and CTO of BetterDB, where he builds Valkey-native observability and caching tooling. He contributes to Valkey and previously worked at Redis as an Engineering Manager on developer tooling. He spends most of his time on monitoring and obvservability, which extented... Read More →

Monday October 5, 2026 15:05 - 15:35 CEST
Chamber Hall, Level 3

Use Cases/Adoption

Audience Level Intermediate

16:05 CEST

Reduce LLM Inference Cost up To 80% Using a KV Cache With Valkey - Chaitanya Nuthalapati, Amazon Web Services

Monday October 5, 2026 16:05 - 16:25 CEST

Chamber Hall, Level 3

Agentic AI applications are GPU intensive and expensive to run. KV caching allows reuse of computed work for repeated context to reduce latency and costs by up to 80%. This talk explains how KV caching works and walks through a production architecture using vLLM as the inference engine and Valkey as a distributed cache. The talk examines performance implications of cache tuning with LMCache and recent innovations in Valkey that break the ceiling on this performance. You will leave with practical implementation guidance and a framework for evaluating when a database-backed KV cache tier improves your AI application.

Speakers

Chaitanya Nuthalapati

Senior Technical Product Manager, Amazon Web Services

Chaitanya is a Senior Technical Product Manager in AWS In-Memory Database Services, focused on Amazon ElastiCache for Valkey. Previously, he built solutions with generative AI, machine learning, and graph networks. Off the clock, Chaitanya is busy collecting hobbies, which currently... Read More →

Monday October 5, 2026 16:05 - 16:25 CEST
Chamber Hall, Level 3

Ecosystem/Integrations

Audience Level Advanced

16:45 CEST

Securing Valkey in Production: Developer Best Practices for Auth, ACLs, and Data Protection - Sakshi Nasha, Cohesity

Monday October 5, 2026 16:45 - 17:05 CEST

Chamber Hall, Level 3

Are you sure your in-memory datastore is truly secured against unauthorized access, accidental key overrides, and data exposure in production?

Securing Valkey goes far beyond setting a single cluster password. As microservice architectures scale, developers must balance zero-trust isolation with low latency. In this talk, we bridge the gap between application code and Valkey security models. We will explore practical strategies for implementing granular Access Control Lists (ACLs), mutual TLS (mTLS) certificate mapping, and secure connection pooling without sacrificing execution speed.

We'll also dive into recent enterprise security enhancements across modern Valkey releases, including database-level ACL scoping (db=N), enterprise LDAP integration, and automated TLS certificate rotation. You'll walk away with actionable code patterns for multi-tenant key isolation, least-privilege command restrictions, and audit logging.

Whether you're building high-throughput microservices or managing sensitive cached datasets, this session equips you with the tools to build a robust defense-in-depth architecture.
Excited to share best practices and secure our Valkey applications together!

Speakers

Sakshi Nasha

Senior Software Engineer, Cohesity

Sakshi Nasha is a Software Engineer with a passion for building software and driving diversity in tech. An open-source enthusiast and OpenSearch Ambassador, she actively contributes to FOSS communities and speaks internationally on topics including GO, APIs, Security, PostgreSQL and... Read More →

Monday October 5, 2026 16:45 - 17:05 CEST
Chamber Hall, Level 3

Features (Valkey 10.0)

Audience Level Intermediate

17:05 CEST

A Field Guide To Your First Valkey Operator PR - Sagar Utekar, CrowdStrike

Monday October 5, 2026 17:05 - 17:15 CEST

Chamber Hall, Level 3

The Valkey ecosystem is bigger than the server: operators, Helm charts, clients, and tooling, all short on contributors. I recently went from running Valkey to landing merged PRs in the Valkey operator: priorityClassName support so cache pods survive scheduling pressure, and an e2e test verifying failover when a primary receives SIGTERM.

This talk is the field guide I wish I'd had. Concretely: how to pick a first issue maintainers actually want fixed (mine were an open feature request and a known testing gap); setting up a productive dev loop with Kind and the e2e suite, including the toolchain gotchas that cost me an evening; reading a controller's reconcile flow well enough to change it safely; and writing a deterministic e2e test for something as messy as killing a primary and asserting failover.

I'll also share what review taught me: what maintainers pushed back on, the mistake I made in a review thread (asserting something about the codebase without verifying it; don't), and why small PRs build trust faster than big ones.

If you use Valkey but have never contributed, this is your on-ramp: a map of the ecosystem's open needs and a realistic first-contribution checklist.

Speakers

Sagar Utekar

SRE, CrowdStrike

The Valkey ecosystem extends beyond the core server, but its operators and tooling are short on contributors. After landing my first operator PRs adding priorityClassName support and SIGTERM failover tests, I built the field guide I wish I’d had. This talk covers picking issues... Read More →

Monday October 5, 2026 17:05 - 17:15 CEST
Chamber Hall, Level 3

Audience Level Any

17:15 CEST

Closing Keynote: Where is Valkey Going?

Monday October 5, 2026 17:15 - 17:35 CEST

Chamber Hall, Level 3

Monday October 5, 2026 17:15 - 17:35 CEST
Chamber Hall, Level 3

Keynote Sessions