Aiven for Valkey vs Varnish Cache
Aiven for Valkey
aiven.io
Varnish Cache
varnish.orgSide by side
| Figure | Aiven for Valkey | Varnish Cache |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $15/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 6 | 1 |
| Spec score · Caching Software | 8.6 (#3) | 7.3 (#16) |
| Founded | 2016 | 2010 |
| Headquarters | Helsinki, Finland | Stockholm, Sweden |
| Security | Aiven says its services use dedicated virtual machines and encryption for data in transit and at rest, with SSO/SAML and VPC peering options. | The security guide describes four control levels: command-line arguments, the CLI interface, VCL programs, and HTTP requests. |
| Support | Aiven’s pricing page says a baseline support tier is included with every Aiven plan at no extra charge. | The project points users to Discord, Stack Overflow, and LinkedIn, and says commercial support is available through Varnish Software. |
Plans
Aiven for Valkey
- FreeFree
- Developer$15 a month
- Hobbyist$19 a month
- Startup$19 a month
- Business$70 a month
- Premium$85 a month
In their own words
Aiven for Valkey
Aiven for Valkey is a managed in-memory key/value datastore for real-time workloads, including caching, message queuing, session storage, retrieval-augmented generation, and real-time analytics. The product page identifies Valkey 9.1 as its current version. Valkey 9 and later services include Bloom and Search modules by default; Search handles vector, full-text, numeric, and tag queries. Aiven documents compatibility with Redis OSS 7.2.4 and migration support from Redis implementations and Valkey databases. Customers can manage the service through Aiven Console, CLI, API, or Terraform. Aiven advertises a 99.99% uptime SLA, automatic failover, and backups every 12 hours on applicable plans. Security options include encryption in transit and at rest, SSO/SAML, and VPC peering. The free plan has one node, 1 CPU, and 1 GB RAM, but excludes integrations, support services, VPCs, static IPs, and the 99.99% SLA. Pricing includes a free plan, paid plans from $15/mo, and a 30-day trial.
Varnish Cache
Varnish Cache is a reverse caching proxy for Linux and self-hosted deployments. It serves cached responses from memory and sends other requests to origin servers. Its caching policy is defined in Varnish Configuration Language (VCL), which compiles to native code. Cached objects follow standard HTTP cache headers and leave the cache when they expire. Varnish supports TLS termination within the process and TLS connections to dynamic origin backends. It includes varnishlog for structured logging and varnishstat for metrics, and offers official container images and a Kubernetes Helm chart. Installation guidance covers Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and compatible distributions. Varnish modules add functions callable from VCL. Its security guide describes controls at the command-line, CLI, VCL, and HTTP request levels. The free plan costs nothing. One limit to account for: Varnish avoids caching data when it cannot determine that doing so is safe, and applications may need configuration changes to reach a high cache hit rate.