Memorystore for Valkey vs Aiven for Valkey: sharding and node recovery

Memorystore for Valkey fits Google Cloud teams that want capacity control and customer-deployed autoscaling. Aiven for Valkey offers broader cloud placement, but horizontal growth requires a new clustered service in Limited Availability. For either service, choose the starting topology around how your application will grow and recover from a failed node.

At a glance

About Google Cloud Memorystore

Google Cloud Memorystore for Valkey is a managed caching service built on Valkey. It offers cluster-enabled and cluster-disabled deployments in Google Cloud, with customers choosing node types, capacity, and topology. Memorystore for Redis and Redis Cluster are separate related offerings.

About Aiven for Valkey

Aiven for Valkey is Aiven’s managed Valkey service, available on AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. Its plans provide different capacity and replication configurations, with non-clustered and clustered service options. Aiven manages routine infrastructure and database operations.

Recent updates

September 24, 2026 - Memorystore’s current Valkey 9 release became generally available. Teams evaluating Valkey 9 can now select that release. The current version table lists that release as the default. Upgrades cannot be downgraded.

September 2, 2026 - Momento introduced Cluster and Flex capacity for Momento Cache. Both provide dedicated, managed Valkey resources. Cluster exposes topology choices, while Flex selects topology within capacity bounds, giving teams a choice in how they configure capacity while Momento operates the cluster.

Choose a topology that can grow with the workload

With Memorystore, your team selects node types and shard counts. Its six regular clustered node types provide predefined combinations of CPU and memory. You can deploy the Memorystore Cluster Autoscaler to adjust shard counts from CPU and memory demand. Your team configures and operates that automation.

Memorystore’s cluster mode also determines how applications connect. Cluster-enabled instances need cluster-aware clients. Cluster-disabled instances use one shard and ordinary clients. You can resize capacity within either mode, but you cannot switch modes in place.

Aiven clustering is in Limited Availability and requires a new service and cluster-aware clients.

Match the recovery path to the data

Aiven’s non-clustered Startup plan uses one node. Losing that node means restoring a replacement from backup, with downtime and loss of writes since the backup. Business adds a standby, and Premium adds two, with automatic failover. (Aiven high availability)

Memorystore’s asynchronous replication can lose acknowledged writes during an unexpected failover.

Size Aiven for client connections

Aiven ties its connection estimate to purchased server memory. Its 4 GB example estimates 16,384 concurrent connections, with actual limits varying by plan and provider. A large client fleet can therefore make connection capacity a sizing concern even when the dataset is small.

Try Momento Cache

For a workload whose client fleet is growing faster than its dataset, Momento Cache offers a gateway designed for millions of clients. With Valkey available in all three services, client integration and operating ownership are useful reasons to evaluate it.

Momento Cache puts dedicated, high-performance Valkey behind a managed gateway that keeps client integration stable as your application grows. Choose Cluster for direct control over instance types, shards, and replicas, or Flex to set capacity and replication bounds while Momento selects the topology. Both include built-in autoscaling and fully managed cluster operations.

Talk to a Momento solution engineer to evaluate the capacity model and configuration that fit your workload.

Frequently asked questions

How do their uptime SLAs compare?

Memorystore and Aiven each offer a 99.99% uptime SLA.

How quickly can support respond?

Google Cloud support offers initial response from 5 minutes. Aiven support offers initial response from 15 minutes.

What needs care when scaling Memorystore down?

For eviction-dependent workloads, Google warns against reducing CPU or memory because memory spikes can block operations. Resharding can also increase latency while the service stays available. (Memorystore best practices)