Microsoft's newest Garnet will make your Windows run faster than ever before

Microsoft announced the release of Garnet, a new cache-store system that effectively makes every platform and service it integrates with run faster, by deploying new cache-store methods to deal with cache-related issues and algorithms.

Garnet addresses a series of limitations of the current methods, and it is capable of further optimizing the processes that deal with storing cache data resulting in a faster performance overall.

We’re not talking about a specific platform, but a variety of them, and the Redmond-based tech giant says Garnet can be integrated into Windows, and its Web Experiences Platform, such as Copilot, or Microsoft Edge, but it can also make software developing-oriented platforms, such as  Azure Resource Manager, and Azure Resource Graph, run faster.

The Redmond-based tech giant made Garet open-source (Microsoft also made Retina, another Azure service, open-source, as well) and it is available to download and integrated with applications on GitHub.

According to Microsoft, Garnet offers multiple benefits compared to the legacy cache-store methods, including, but not limited to:

• Orders-of-magnitude better server throughput (ops/sec) with small batches and many client sessions, relative to comparable open-source cache-stores.
• Extremely low single operation latency (often less than 300 microseconds at the 99.9th percentile) on commodity cloud (Azure) machines with accelerated TCP enabled, on both Windows and Linux.
• Better scalability as we increase the number of clients, with or without client-side batching.
• The ability to use all CPU/memory resources of a server machine with a single shared-memory server instance (no intra-node cluster needed).
• Support for larger-than-memory datasets, spilling to local and cloud storage devices.
• Database features such as fast checkpointing and recovery, and publish/subscribe.
• Support for multi-node sharded hash partitioning (Redis “cluster” mode), state migration, and replication.
• Well-tested with a comprehensive test suite (thousands of unit tests across Garnet and its storage layer Tsavorite).
• A C# codebase that is easy to evolve and extend.

In a blog post, Microsoft details the struggles of coming up with an innovative way of dealing with cache-store, including the possibility of developing a method that offers faster optimization and would consume fewer resources.

The Redmond-based tech giant says it has been working on Garnet since 2021, and based on their previous work, the open-source  FASTER embedded key-value library, they managed to come up with a new remote cache store that had all the necessary features to replace existing cache stores.

Most of the current technology, and Windows devices should be able to make use of Garnet to provide a faster experience to users, but Microsoft is also hoping that the open-source community will contribute to making Garnet even better than it is now.

You can read the full blog post here.