Run Valkey (Redis)

This assumes you can already reach your cluster with kubectl (see the kubectl quickstart).

Valkey is an in-memory key/value store for caching, sessions, and queues. It’s the BSD-licensed, Linux Foundation fork of Redis and a drop-in replacement: the same wire protocol and the same clients (redis-py, ioredis, Jedis, go-redis, …) work unchanged. You’ll deploy a single instance in its own namespace, with persistence so its data survives pod restarts.

Deploy

Create a dedicated namespace:

kubectl create namespace valkey

Caution

Change the VALKEY_PASSWORD value below before applying.

Deploy Valkey, its storage, and a Service into the namespace:

cat <<'EOF' | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: valkey
  namespace: valkey
stringData:
  VALKEY_PASSWORD: change-me
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: valkey
  namespace: valkey
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 5Gi
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: valkey
  namespace: valkey
spec:
  replicas: 1
  strategy:
    type: Recreate
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: valkey
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: valkey
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: valkey
          image: valkey/valkey:8
          command:
            - sh
            - -c
            - exec valkey-server --requirepass "$VALKEY_PASSWORD" --appendonly yes
          env:
            - name: VALKEY_PASSWORD
              valueFrom:
                secretKeyRef:
                  name: valkey
                  key: VALKEY_PASSWORD
          ports:
            - containerPort: 6379
          volumeMounts:
            - name: data
              mountPath: /data
      volumes:
        - name: data
          persistentVolumeClaim:
            claimName: valkey
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: valkey
  namespace: valkey
spec:
  selector:
    app: valkey
  ports:
    - port: 6379
      targetPort: 6379
EOF

Security

This Service is ClusterIP, so the store is only reachable from inside the cluster. On a single-tenant skube cluster that’s the safe default: keep your app and Valkey in the cluster and connect over the Service.

If you need to reach it from outside the cluster:

• For occasional access, prefer kubectl port-forward -n valkey service/valkey 6379:6379 over a public endpoint. It tunnels through the API server and exposes nothing.
• Valkey speaks its own TCP protocol, not HTTP, so the Ingress and Gateway guides don’t apply. To expose it for real, enable Valkey’s own TLS.
• Use a strong password, not change-me, and rotate the secret if it leaks.

Connect

Check it’s responding (use the password you set above):

kubectl exec -n valkey deploy/valkey -- valkey-cli -a change-me ping

A PONG response means it’s up. Open an interactive shell:

kubectl exec -n valkey -it deploy/valkey -- valkey-cli -a change-me

From there, the basics, store a value, read it back, and set one that expires:

SET greeting "hello from skube"
GET greeting
SET session:42 active EX 30   # expires in 30 seconds
TTL session:42                # seconds left
DBSIZE                        # number of keys
DEL greeting

Other workloads in the cluster connect with this URL (<password> is the value from the secret above):

redis://:<password>@valkey.valkey.svc.cluster.local:6379

Clean up

Delete the namespace to remove everything at once:

kubectl delete namespace valkey

This destroys the stored data along with it.