Speed thrills: Deliver lightning-fast apps to your users with VMware Tanzu GemFire

December 17, 2019 Jagdish Mirani

Every modern app needs a cache. These architectures are highly distributed and data-intensive. Consequently, the timely response to a user request often depends on a large number of services. When you have a lag in a data-intensive service, the overall performance of your app slows and results in unhappy users. Adding a cache smoothes over these performance dips, but only if the cache itself is highly performant.

That’s why we’re on a mission to make Pivotal Cloud Cache the most performant cache for modern apps. Another priority: making Cloud Cache easier to use for developers. These are multi-release themes, and the arrival of Cloud Cache v1.10 breaks new ground on both fronts.

Delight your users with zippy page loads and rapid search results

Recent Cloud Cache releases have amped up performance using multiple approaches. Cloud Cache v1.8 offered incremental improvement to gets and puts (9% and 7%, respectively). Server-side gets (internal to a cluster) became 250% faster. 

That release was an opening act for the massive improvements in Cloud Cache v1.10—gets are now 400% faster, and puts are 200% faster.

This breakthrough performance stems from Apache Geode™, the open-source underpinning of Cloud Cache. If you want to learn more about this performance work, Helena Bales wrote a blog post, and spoke on the topic at the recent Geode Summit.

Why do these improvements matter? Because modern application architectures are performance-hungry and data-intensive. This need for speed permeates all use cases. Caching exists to make your apps faster. So when the cache itself gets faster, it’s a big deal!

Consider one of the most popular use cases for caching: user session data. This demanding scenario generates lots of app requests which must be processed simultaneously. The cache must deliver high concurrency and high throughput. 

Further, modern apps are always demanding more from their cache. The quantity of data saved as part of the session state is growing. Your cache needs to dynamically scale, and Pivotal Cloud Cache delivers!

Cloud Cache <3 Node.js: Supercharge your Node apps with a new client library (beta)

Cloud Cache has supported Java, C++, and .NET for a while, but now we’ve added beta support for another framework: Node.js.

Your Node.js developers will love Cloud Cache because it provides better performance! But without a client library, developers would have to code logic in JavaScript and use REST calls to access data from the cache. The Node.js client library allows app API calls that communicate directly with the cache, a faster approach than using REST calls.

What can Node developers do with Cloud Cache? The beta release includes these key features:

  • Support for put (putAll), and get (getAll) operations

  • Query cached data

  • Function execution

  • TLS encryption of data in transit

This is a private beta. For access, customers can reach out to your balanced account team. New to Cloud Cache? Contact us for access via email: cloud-cache-pm@pivotal.io. Then, check out the getting started guide here: https://github.com/gemfire/node-examples

A new Cloud Cache site helps Spring developers get started in minutes

Want to bring Cloud Cache to your apps? It’s never been easier, thanks to a new Cloud Cache developer site. Create your first Hello, World! app. Then, add a simple cache to your app. Don’t see what you’re looking for? Tell us using the “Give Feedback” link. (One last note: this new developer site complements the tried-and-true documentation for Cloud Cache.)

Ready to do more with Cloud Cache? Visit start.spring.io, and add in Geode dependencies. 

It’s time to upgrade to Pivotal Cloud Cache 1.10

If you’re new to caching or to Cloud Cache, check out our product page which describes common use cases. You can also browse recent blog posts and webinars here. If you’re ready to start building, try Cloud Cache in a dev sandbox on Pivotal Web Services. (Don’t have an account yet? Sign-up for free.)

You might also find the Geode Summit presentations to be very useful, as Cloud Cache is based on the project. Recordings from the recent summit (and prior summits) can be found here.

About the Author

Jagdish Mirani

Jagdish Mirani is an enterprise software executive with extensive experience in Product Management and Product Marketing. Currently he is in charge of Product Marketing for Pivotal's data services (Cloud Cache, MySQL, Redis, PostgreSQL). Prior to Pivotal, Jagdish was at Oracle for 10 years in their Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence groups. More recently, Jag was at AgilOne, a startup in the predictive marketing cloud space. Prior to AgilOne, Jag held various Business Intelligence roles at Business Objects (now part of SAP), Actuate (now part OpenText), and NetSuite (now part of Oracle). Jagdish holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Santa Clara University and an MBA from the U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business.

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