Hazelcast Releases IMDG 3.9 GA – Performance, Usability & Scalability Enhancements

Palo Alto, Calif., October 25, 2017Hazelcast®, the leading open source in-memory data grid (IMDG) with hundreds of thousands of installed clusters and over 39 million server starts per month, today announced Hazelcast IMDG® 3.9 is generally available as a production ready build. Major themes of Hazelcast IMDG 3.9 include new usability, performance and scalability improvements.

In distributed architectures, remote operations are slower than local ones so it is often more cost effective to increase the ratio of the latter. In Hazelcast clusters, this is enabled by near cache. In earlier versions of Hazelcast IMDG, near cache was only available for Java clients but as Hazelcast looks to expand its footprint beyond its traditional Java heartland near-cache is now available for all clients including Scala, .Net/C#, C++, Python and Node.js.

Enhanced application speed is the key of benefit of using near cache. Near cache is often used to serve a small subset of very hot items with minimal latency. When an entry is found in a near cache, it can be immediately returned to the caller and no network communication is involved. In older versions of Hazelcast IMDG, near cache keys were stored as serialized blobs, consequently keys were serialized with each get request. This proved to affect application performance which is why Hazelcast IMDG 3.9 allows users to use de-serialized objects as near-cache keys. Along with other improvements, near-cache lookups now drop down to high nanosecond times, making near cache as fast as dedicated in-process caches.

Dynamic configuration of data structures is another popular community request feature included in Hazelcast IMDG 3.9. In previous Hazelcast versions, users would need to provide all configurations upfront. There was no supported way to submit, for example, a new IMap configuration into a running cluster. In 3.9, users can now submit new configurations into a running cluster and Hazelcast will automatically distribute this configuration to all cluster members.

Lite cluster members act as regular members, but they do not own any data. They can be used as pure computation nodes or as an alternative to clients. In 3.9 it is now possible to start a Lite member and promote it later to a full member if needed. This is useful when your application is starting and you want to delay data migrations until the application is fully initialized.

Notable Hazelcast IMDG Enterprise 3.9 enhancements include:

  • High-Density (HD) Memory Store Indexes: In Hazelcast IMDG 3.9, HD IMap always stores indexes in HD memory, resulting in predictable performance while indexes can be used to speed-up queries.
  • Rolling Upgrades: Hazelcast IMDG 3.8 included an infrastructure to support Rolling Upgrade to a new minor release. Hazelcast IMDG 3.9 is the first version using this infrastructure, meaning customers can upgrade their 3.8 cluster into 3.9 without any outage.

Greg Luck, CEO of Hazelcast, said: “We continue to refine Hazelcast IMDG to extend our lead as best in class for caching and IMDG use cases to achieve true enterprise grade.”