If you haven't fainted by now after reading that title, or at least nearly, I don't know what will. Microsoft Interop team earlier today just announced Redis on Windows prototype project.

Redis On Windows

Redis is an open source, networked, in-memory, key-value data store with optional atomicity and durability. Or to put it in simple (but rather vague term), Redis is one of thoes NoSQL databases. Made popular by Craigslist and Groupon.

In the Microsoft stack, we currently have access to Windows Azure Table Storage, RavenDB, MongoDB, CouchDB and so on. The reason why Redis wasn't initially supported on Windows was due to the lack of a specific OS level function called fork/copy on write which allows data to still be read while written. To overcome this, he Microsoft interop team re-implemented the same feature on the software level as a part of Redis on Windows.

The last surprise was the fact that the Interop team has decided to make GitHub as their home instead of CodePlex.

Little Cloud Value

Is this is a game changer? I don't think so.

With the advent of the cloud, it makes sense for one to want to use Redis on Windows Azure : which I'm sure can be made to work with little effort. However the issue is around the economics. To store approx. 2GB of data on Azure Table will cost you approx 25 cents/month. Whereas running a full small sized VM instance (to get approx 2GB of RAM for Redis) means paying 2 x $90/month (2 instances for high availability.

Regardless whether it makes sense or not, it is still nice to see that we have more options in what we do without necessarily switching to a different OS if we don't want to.

Redis on Windows is available on GitHub https://github.com/MSOpenTech/redis however still not labelled as ready for production yet.