Percona taps DevOps pioneer for observability push. October 29, 2026 Percona has appointed Kris Buytaert as its Observability Practice Lead. Buytaert is one of the instigators of the #devops movement and a longtime Linux and open-source expert. During his career, he has previously focused on Infrastructure as Code, Continuous Delivery, High Availability, and Scalability projects. He is now responsible for building and delivering observability solutions for Percona customers. In his new role, Buytaert will expand Percona's observability offerings and help shape the company's product and partner strategy. That strategy is vibrant, and it is a further indication of the investment that Percona is putting into its core observability platform, Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM). PMM is free and open source, providing database monitoring, management and observability for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and MariaDB across on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments. Percona's recently announced partnership with Coroot extends this coverage beyond databases: Coroot Percona Edition complements PMM with full-stack visibility into applications, networks and infrastructure. Earlier this week, Percona also announced the general availability of PMM High Availability. Bennie Grant, Chief Operating Officer, Percona. "We believe we can provide significantly more value to our customers by expanding our observability offerings beyond the database. Kris has helped shape how the DevOps community thinks about monitoring and observability, and he brings real-world experience from years of working alongside the teams who run infrastructure. He'll help us build solutions grounded in the same open source values our customers count on us for." Who is Kris Buytaert. Buytaert is based in Belgium and joins from Inuits, the open-source IT service and consulting company, where he was CTO and co-founder in 2007. He has also acted as an Ambassador for the Continuous Delivery Foundation since 2025 and has contributed to the continuous open-source community. Prior to Inuits, he co-founded O11y and spent time as the DevOps and Linux expert at firms such as VDAB, ING and Intelliplan AB. Buytaert has a degree in Computer Science from KU Leuven. He co-founded devopsdays in 2009 and has helped organise the series ever since. He also runs CfgMgmtCamp, one of the largest open-source infrastructure automation conferences, and regularly speaks internationally on monitoring, observability, infrastructure as code and continuous delivery. His most recent appearance was at Percona Live in Amsterdam in September 2026. Buytaerts joined Percona to help organisations with observability challenges they face today. As database environments become more distributed and complex, performance issues often extend beyond the database. Organisations need visibility across applications, infrastructure and the data layer to identify and resolve problems quickly. Buytaert commented, "When something goes wrong, the database often gets the blame, even when the real issue is somewhere else. Percona has deep expertise across the data layer. I want to build on that and help customers see across their entire stack, so they can get to the root cause faster. My goal in this role is to give organizations practical, open source-driven observability services and solutions they can trust, no matter the tools they choose to run." Enterprise times: what does this mean? For Percona, Buytaert's appointment signals a broader ambition: to help customers understand performance across their entire technology stack, rather than just the database. Building on PMM, the Coroot partnership and PMM High Availability, the new practice could strengthen Percona's position as an open-source observability provider, while creating opportunities to expand its services and deepen customer relationships. Customers gain the potential benefit of a clearer view of how databases, applications, networks and infrastructure interact. Combined with Percona's database expertise, this could help teams locate root causes faster and avoid blaming the database for problems elsewhere. However, the value will depend on how effectively Percona turns these capabilities into practical, integrated solutions. Partners, particularly Coroot, the appointment could support closer collaboration around product integration, customer delivery and joint opportunities. A dedicated practice lead provides a focal point for shaping complementary offerings, although the announcement does not yet set out specific partner programmes or commercial commitments. The appointment gives Buytaert the opportunity to translate his DevOps experience into a customer-facing practice, influence Percona's product and partner strategy, and demonstrate how open-source observability can address operational challenges.

Redis by proxy: Percona targets the last major hurdle to Valkey adoption. Valkey-proxy lets companies stuck on Redis migrate without having to rewrite their apps. The code is set to go public this month. When Redis changed its licensing in 2024, replacing its permissive BSD license with proprietary, source-available alternatives, it prompted a major split in the community. Within days, the Linux Foundation launched Valkey, an open source fork. While Redis did subsequently change course again, adding the copyleft AGPLv3 open source license as an option in 2025, Valkey was already forging its own path for organizations that wanted a permissively licensed project with independent governance. Much has happened in the intervening months, with Valkey moving to reduce its memory requirements, introducing new cluster management and access-control features, and more recently starting to use AI agents to help with maintenance work such as backporting fixes. But for some Redis users, at least one major migration hurdle remains. Proxy access. Redis, for the uninitiated, is an in-memory data store widely used for caching and other workloads where fast access is an imperative. Many applications were built to interact with Redis as though it were a single instance, and moving those applications to a distributed Valkey Cluster can mean changing code so it can deal with multiple nodes, routing, and differences in how certain commands behave. Commercial Redis products and some cloud services get around this with proxy layers that sit between the application and the underlying cluster, but companies that want to run Valkey themselves have lacked an equivalent option. And so Percona is now looking to fill that gap with Valkey-proxy, an open source proxy that allows existing applications to connect to a Valkey Cluster without having to be rewritten. Percona is an open source database software and services company that supports technologies including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB. It's also one of the companies backing the Valkey project, alongside cloud heavyweights including AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle. In an interview at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit Europe conference in Prague, Kyle Davis, general manager for the Redis/Valkey ecosystem at Percona, says that having to rewrite applications before they can move to clustered Valkey deployments is one of the last big blockers to wider adoption. "Right now there's not really any good open source solution for this." "Right now there's not really any good open source solution for this, and so there's been this gap," Davis tells The New Stack. For what it's worth, there are other proxies out there. Davis points to Envoy as one example, but says it doesn't fully understand the Valkey protocol and handles connections in a way that means it can't support everything Valkey can do. That leaves some companies caught between older applications built around a single Redis instance, and the clustered Valkey deployments they would need as they grow. Valkey-proxy is designed to bridge that divide. "Now we can address a whole different layer of applications that really didn't have a good option," Davis added. "Now we can address a whole different layer of applications that really didn't have a good option." The case for Valkey-proxy. Percona has developed the first version of Valkey-proxy internally, but the plan is to move it into the Valkey project before opening development up to the wider community. "From there, we're going to get a lot of contributions from Percona's customers, customers from other places, and independent developers," Davis says. Asked whether hyperscalers like AWS might also contribute, Davis says "potentially," but adds that it's difficult to predict because they often have their own tools tied directly to their services. That makes Valkey-proxy particularly relevant to organizations that manage their own infrastructure, including those running on premises. Davis says the potential user base ranges from smaller companies with limited resources, to large financial services organizations with strict compliance requirements - businesses that may need greater control over where and how their data infrastructure runs. Moreover, the proxy could also give the Valkey project somewhere to add other capabilities over time. "Filling that missing gap allows us to have more flexibility, and now we can start doing things in a different way." "It provides a decoupling layer that in the future we can build other components into," Davis continues. "Filling that missing gap allows us to have more flexibility, and now we can start doing things in a different way." For now, however, the focus is on getting the project into users' hands. Percona received approval in late September for Valkey-proxy to become part of the Valkey project, and is now moving the code from private repositories into the public project. The aim is to have all of the source code publicly available by the end of October, followed by a release candidate in December and general availability by early 2027. Davis says the intervening period will be important for finding edge cases as users begin testing the proxy against their own applications. Freshworks will be among the first to do so, and Davis says the company is already working with Percona on Valkey-proxy as an early user and design partner, helping uncover issues as development continues. "That's going to be a great test case for it," he adds.