Garnet: A Next-Generation Cache-Store for Accelerating Applications and Services

Remote cache-stores have seen a dramatic rise in importance in recent years, fueled by a surge in data-driven applications. Most prior database research has focused on various aspects of traditional key-value stores with string values and a simple get/set based remote interface. However, modern cache-stores such as Redis offer a significantly richer interface that has witnessed unprecedented popularity and broad adoption across the developer community. The interface and use cases for such cache-stores in both end-user applications and large-scale services translate to new requirements on storage, scale, complex data type support, and durability.

Garnet is a new cache-store that adopts the Redis wire protocol for compatibility, but rethinks from a database perspective how such a modern cache-store system should be designed from the ground up to meet these requirements. Research insights across the storage, network, and cluster stack allow Garnet to support the large Redis interface as a drop-in replacement, yet achieve stronger database features—thread- and node-scalability, durability, transactions—and better end-to-end performance (up to 100X higher throughput and 4X lower latency at high percentiles). These results translate to lower end-to-end costs for real-word applications and services.