Slizen: an open-source hot-key protection proxy for Redis and Valkey

[gazakov]

Hi I’m building Slizen, an open-source RESP proxy for read-heavy Redis and Valkey workloads.

It detects hot keys, coalesces concurrent misses, and selectively caches only approved prefixes while Redis or Valkey remains the source of truth.

In the published v0.2.3-rc.1 99/1 workload, physical origin GETs dropped from 94,961 to 759 with zero request failures or value mismatches. Direct p99 remained lower, so the intended benefit is origin relief rather than universally faster requests.

The project currently supports single-node isolated staging trials and starts in observe mode.

I’m looking for up to three teams that have experienced real hot-key or read-spike incidents and can try it in a non-production environment.

Repository:
https://github.com/slizendb/slizen