News

Hazelcast Launches Fully Modularized In-Memory Data Grid

• By John K. Waters
• August 24, 2016

Hazelcast unveiled the first fully modularized version of its namesake in-memory data grid (IMDG) and caching solution. Hazelcast 3.7 comes with 29 new plug-in modules and eight new programming language bindings, along with numerous bug fixes and other new features.

The company says this release marks the "full realization" of its modularization strategy. "Each client/language and plug-in is now a module," explained Enes Akar, Hazelcast VP of Engineering, in a blog post. "When you download a 3.7 distribution, it contains the latest released version. But we can release updates, new features and bug fixes much faster than the Hazelcast core. When we say in this blog we will release something parallel to 3.7, we mean we are releasing a module. And it speeds up development. And of course it is easier to contribute to as an open source contributor."

The company credits the decision to rework Hazelcast's networking layer for a 30 percent performance improvement in this release over version 3.6. To back up its performance claims, the company cited several published benchmarks, including Oracle Coherence Benchmark Suite, Red Hat Infinispan Benchmark, GridGain/Apache Ignite Benchmark and Redis.

The Hazelcast IMDG is an open-source product licensed under an Apache license that allows developers to include the grid in their applications. Hazelcast Enterprise is the commercially supported version.

Hazelcast has roots planted deeply in the Java language and platform (its IMDG is written in Java), but the company has spread its support over the years, thanks in part to the efforts of its open source community, to include a number of clients and programming languages, including .NET/C++, Node.js, Python, Clojure and Scala.

"Java is currently the most popular programming language in the enterprise," said Hazelcast CEO Greg Luck in an e-mail, citing the latest listings on the Tiobe Index. "Being popular in the enterprise means you have to get along with everyone else in the IT landscape, and this is the main reason for Hazelcast's 'Any application, in any cloud, anytime' strategy."

With this release, Hazelcast now supports deployment into nine different cloud environments. It comes with native integration with the Cloud Foundry and OpenShift PaaSes. And it provides container deployment options for Docker. The data grid is also now live on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.