Microsoft's new cache-store system promises to run applications faster
2 min. read
Published on
Share this article
Improve this guide
Read our disclosure page to find out how can you help MSPoweruser sustain the editorial team Read more
Key notes
- Garnet is Microsoft’s new cache-store system.
- Microsoft claims deploying it will result in apps and services running faster.
- Garnet is open source and can be downloaded for free from GitHub.
Microsoft has announced a new cache-store system called Garnet, which, as per the company, will exploit the latest hardware capabilities at a greater level and help app developers run their apps faster. Garnet is open source and has already deployed in Windows & Web Experiences Platform, Azure Resource Manager, and Azure Resource Graph.
In its official blog post, Microsoft pointed out several issues with legacy cache store systems. For example, the software giant highlighted that many of the older cache-store systems are “not explicitly designed to be easily extensible by app developers or to work well on diverse platforms and operating systems.” None of that exists with Garnet, since it’s open source.
Microsoft began working on Garnet way back in 2021, as it felt that applications and services should be able to access data with “higher efficiency, lower latencies, and lower costs than ever before.” On top of addressing all those issues, the new cache store system ensures more “unique benefits” to developers. As pointed out by Microsoft:
- Garnet adopts the popular RESP wire protocol as a starting point, which makes it possible to use Garnet from unmodified Redis clients available in most programming languages today.
- Garnet offers much better scalability and throughput with many client connections and small batches, leading to cost savings for large apps and services.
- Garnet demonstrates better client latency at the 99th and 99.9th percentiles, which is critical to real-world scenarios.
- Based on the latest .NET technology, Garnet is cross-platform, extensible, and modern. It is designed to be easy to develop for and evolve, without sacrificing performance in the common case. We leveraged the rich library ecosystem of .NET for API breadth, with open opportunities for optimization. Thanks to our careful use of .NET, Garnet achieves state-of-the-art performance on both Linux and Windows.
If you’re a developer, you can download Garnet here from GitHub and contribute to it.
