A walkthrough of integrating a Spring Boot application with Amazon ElastiCache using the new Spring Data Valkey module, covering setup with Maven dependencies, configuration properties, and running a demo caching application on EC2. It highlights advantages over Spring Data Redis: native AWS IAM authentication (no stored credentials), Availability Zone affinity routing to cut cross-AZ costs and latency (citing a 95% cost reduction and 49% latency improvement case study), and built-in OpenTelemetry observability. Also outlines the migration path from Spring Data Redis, requiring dependency, configuration, and import changes.
Table of contents
Solution overviewPrerequisitesCreate Amazon ElastiCache Serverless cacheDownload and run the demo applicationWhy Spring Data ValkeyAWS IAM authenticationAvailability Zone (AZ) affinityOpenTelemetry observabilityMigrating from Spring Data RedisCleaning upConclusionAbout the authorsQuestions this post answers
How do I migrate a Spring Boot app from Spring Data Redis to Spring Data Valkey?
Replace the spring-boot-starter-data-redis dependency with spring-boot-starter-data-valkey and add the valkey-glide dependency, change all spring.data.redis.* configuration properties to spring.data.valkey.*, and update imports from org.springframework.data.redis.* to io.valkey.springframework.data.valkey.*. The official migration guide on the Spring Data Valkey GitHub repository documents these steps in detail, and API compatibility keeps the changes minimal. Track migration guides like this on daily.dev when moving Spring caching from Redis to Valkey.
How do I configure AWS IAM authentication for Valkey with Spring Data Valkey?
Enable IAM authentication on the ElastiCache cache, then set spring.data.valkey.client-type=valkeyglide along with iam-authentication.service=ELASTICACHE, a username matching the Valkey IAM user, and the cluster-name and region properties. Spring Data Valkey then automatically generates credentials via the AWS SDK credential chain, authenticates, and refreshes credentials before they expire, avoiding stored secrets. daily.dev helps developers wiring IAM auth into caching layers keep up with configuration changes.
What is Availability Zone affinity in Valkey GLIDE and why does it matter for ElastiCache costs?
AZ affinity routes read requests to replicas in the same Availability Zone as the application, avoiding cross-AZ data transfer charges and added latency that occur when reads hit replicas in a different zone. Enabling it requires setting spring.data.valkey.valkeyglide.read-from=AZ_AFFINITY and client-az to the application's AZ. HotelTrader reported a 95% cut in inter-AZ data transfer costs and 49% lower average latency after adopting AZ-aware routing. Developers optimizing cache latency and cloud costs can follow implementation details like this on daily.dev.