Valkey-swift - Announcing 1.0 Release

Last summer, we introduced the preview release of valkey-swift. This 1.0 release delivers a production-ready client with stable APIs that takes full advantage of all the modern features of Swift 6.

Introduction

Valkey-swift is a production-grade Swift client built with modern Swift features in mind. Using Valkey with Swift provides strongly typed APIs with clean semantics, memory-safety and data-race-safety guarantees, and a very light memory footprint. The client API uses Swift’s structured concurrency — a paradigm designed to bring clarity to concurrent programming by using the structure of your code to automatically define the lifetimes of tasks and associated resources. This allows you to write clean concurrent code without worrying about its side effects like race conditions and connection leaks.

Core Features

Valkey-swift has included these core features since our preview release in August 2025:

• Support for all available Valkey commands. Custom code generation tools keep us in sync with the latest commands that Valkey offers.
• Cluster-mode-compatible client with cluster-aware routing, dynamic topology discovery, and handling cluster MOVED redirections.
• Command pipelining to improve performance by batching multiple commands in a single request and connection.
• Support for publish and subscribe to message queues by running multiple subscriptions on a single connection.
• Connection pooling for performance and resilience with support for connections over TLS for end-to-end encryption.
• Support for Valkey Modules: valkey-bloom, valkey-json.

What’s New in valkey-swift 1.0

Since the preview release, we have made significant improvements to the cluster client. Cluster mode error handling is now more robust, with seamless support for ASK and MOVED redirections, and TRYAGAIN errors. We reduced downtime during failovers and connection loss from 30 seconds to under 2 seconds.

The cluster client also now has feature parity with the standard client. It supports cluster-level pipelines and transactions by splitting pipelines across the correct shards, so you don’t have to worry about the location of your keys. We have also improved subscription connection management where both the standalone and the cluster client now allocate a single shared connection for all subscriptions instead of allocating a connection for each subscription.

Finally, both standalone and cluster clients support reading from replicas for scaling reads. Currently, we only support round-robin-based replica selection, but we intend to extend this to include latency aware and AZ-aware methods.

Other improvements in version 1.0 include:

• Support for new commands from Valkey 9.0.
• Support for distributed tracing.
• Dynamic command pipelines defined at runtime. Previously a series of pipelined commands could only be defined at compile time.
• Client configuration for accessing a numbered database.
• Support for the Valkey module valkey-search.

What’s Next

Valkey-swift is constantly adding new features. Planned features include:

• Sentinel mode support.
• Cluster-wide multi-key commands.
• Integration with the Swift package swift-metrics.
• And much more!

Contributing

Valkey-swift is open source under the Apache 2.0 license, and contributions are welcome — bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests. Check out open issues on GitHub for a good starting point.