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Connectivity and the gateway

You connect to a Database with a standard Valkey or Redis client. You do not connect to Valkey nodes directly; traffic flows through a managed gateway in front of your Capacity Pool.

The connection gateway​

Clients connect through a gateway rather than directly to Valkey nodes. This lets the service manage connections and routing on your behalf, while shielding the backend from excess traffic and churn. The gateway also provides a stable endpoint that masks topology changes within the Valkey cluster.

The gateway offloads a variety of traffic responsibilities from the Valkey cluster, such as connection pooling, routing, rate limiting, public TLS termination, HTTP request translation, auth, and more. This helps to efficiently scale a Valkey cluster to millions of clients and millions of RPS.

Connecting to a Database​

Point your preferred client at the pool's gateway endpoint over TLS and authenticate:

  • Username is the Database name.
  • Password is a Momento API token (created in the console).
valkey-cli -h <gateway-endpoint> -p 6379 --tls \
  --user <database-name> --pass <momento-api-token>

Always use a client configured for standalone valkey, not cluster mode. The gateway masks underlying cluster topology, presenting it as if it were a single standalone node.

One connection serves exactly one Database specified by the username. RESP database commands like SELECT are not supported. To use a different Database, open a connection with that Database's name as the username and an API token with appropriate permissions.

Connections always start with RESP2. You can switch to RESP3 per connection with HELLO 3.

Supported commands​

Momento Cache supports a specific set of Valkey commands. Before you port a workload, check Valkey compatibility for the supported command set and the feature families that are not available, such as transactions, pub/sub, and blocking commands.