Velocity CTP3 coming up next week

In the past I've posted a brief discussion about Velocity that was based on my experience with it during CTP1/CTP2, which was a pretty raw and unpolished CTP. CTP2 was an improvement over the original CTP and CTP3 has even more improvements planned.

To recap, Velocity is Microsoft's distributed cache system. What sets it apart from other caches like memcached is that it has some pretty advanced features. Memcached has always struck me as a very useful distributed cache, if all you want is simple keyed put/get/delete. Velocity actually gives us a bit more than that.

Regions allow you to logically group keyed values next to each other. So if you have cached data items that you know are going to be stored and/or retrieved within a short time period of each other you can put them all in the same region. Those keys can have the same back-up policy and can be backed up together. This kind of thing can be used for application partitioning or even finer grained control within an individual application. Let's say you've got a shopping site you might create a region for all of your DVD cache data because if a user is flipping through DVD data on your site, optimizing the cache to feed those requests is a good thing.

Tags. I mentioned this before, and I'll mention it again. You folks all know what a freak I am about tags (even wrote a whitepaper about building tag clouds...) and the fact that not only can I create flat segmentation within my cache via tag, but that I can actually search and retrieve all cache items with a particular tag is awesome.

There are a whole bunch of other features that I am really excited about like auto-failover, backups, HA, load balancing that is not based on a fixed hash (take that memcached!), and much more.

Some of the stuff coming in CTP3 that I can't wait to find out about next week at MIX includes:

• Bulk operation APIs
• Security (including WCF channel security, simple token security, and domain credentials)
• Event Notifications - this is one that I begged for during CTP1. I want the ability for my app to be notified when the cache changes. Keeping in mind that Velocity can be used for more than just ASP.NET, this is a fantastically useful feature, especially if you've got a bunch of back-end stuff running on .NET that is supporting your ASP.NET tier.
• Read-Through/Write-Behind. Mmmmmmm...Performance...

I will post again about Velocity after I get my tech-obssessed hands on CTP3 so stay tuned :)

tags: mix09  mix  velocity  cache  microsoft  ctp  

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