The early-access shelf is one item lighter: Valkey is now open to every Watasu account. It’s the piece almost every production app reaches for sooner or later — the fast, in-memory layer that sits next to your real database and absorbs everything that shouldn’t hit it.
What Valkey is
Valkey is an open-source, in-memory data store that speaks the Redis protocol — your existing client libraries, frameworks, and muscle memory work unchanged. We even inject the connection URL as REDIS_URL on purpose, so the ecosystem’s defaults “just work” without a config hunt.
The mental model is simple: PostgreSQL is your system of record; Valkey is your working memory. Reads in microseconds, writes that don’t queue behind disk, and data structures (lists, sets, sorted sets, TTLs) designed for the patterns below:
- Caching — computed values and query results that are expensive to make and cheap to throw away
- Sessions — fast lookups on every request, with TTLs doing the cleanup
- Rate limiting — counters with expiry, the canonical implementation
- Ephemeral coordination — locks and leader election with TTL safety nets
- Queue acceleration — hot-path state for your background jobs
One command
watasu addons:create valkey --app my-appConnection details land in your app’s config vars, and an interactive session is always one command away:
watasu valkey:cli --app my-app(The redis:cli alias works too — we know about muscle memory.)
Pick a size, not a topology
Plans are deliberately simple. A €1 Hobby instance — single-node, non-persistent — covers prototypes, review apps, and throwaway caches. For everything real, Premium starts at €5/mo, and every Premium size ships the same production posture: AOF persistence, a managed HA standby, and automatic failover. You never choose between “the cheap one that loses data” and “the safe one you can’t afford yet” — you just pick how much memory and how many connections you need, from 50 MB up to 100 GB and 65,000 connections.
Persistent plans support backups — manual everywhere, scheduled on the higher sizes — with the same non-destructive restore-and-promote workflow as every Watasu database.
One honest note for latency tuners: Valkey’s value here is failover topology and durability, not exotic storage. If you’re benchmarking AOF write latency at the edge of what’s possible, read the storage notes in the docs before you size your plan.
Get started
Attach one to your app, point your cache or session store at REDIS_URL, and watch your database breathe easier. The Valkey docs cover plans and backups, and the pricing page has the full ladder. Questions? info@watasu.io — we read everything.