Microsoft Research unveils Garnet which makes apps and services quicker

Microsoft Research has announced a new cache-store solution called Garnet. This open-source product from Microsoft boasts a rich and extensible API, support for memory and tiered storage, has an ultra-low latency pluggable network layer, and has great bare metal performance.

Outlining more benefits of Garnet, Microsoft writes:

• 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.

Garnet is the result of years of work over at Microsoft Research. It said that it evolved from initial work completed in 2018 called FASTER which was an embedded key-value library designed to demonstrate that better performance could be had than present in existing systems.

During the pandemic in 2021, Microsoft Research decided to build on this technology based on Microsoft’s real-world needs and this ended up as Garnet.

Microsoft said that it has deployed Garnet in several place already including the Windows & Web Experiences Platform, Azure Resource Manager, and Azure Resource Graph. As it’s open source code is available on GitHub, third-party developers can take it to make their own applications and services faster too. In the future, Microsoft Research will continue to add new API calls and features and it wants to look into collaboration opportunities in this area.

Source: Microsoft Research