What is Garnet used for?

Garnet is a Microsoft Research cache-store that speaks the Redis protocol, offering clustering, replication and persistence on a cross-platform .NET base. It is a good fit for replacing a Redis server behind existing clients and low-latency caching for large services.

Is Garnet open source?

Yes. Garnet is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at microsoft/garnet and is written mainly in C#.

Yes. Garnet is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available.

Can I self-host Garnet?

Yes. Garnet can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Garnet an alternative to?

Garnet is an open-source alternative to Upstash, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon MemoryDB and Google Memorystore. Other open-source alternatives to Upstash include Redis, Dragonfly and Valkey.

Is Garnet actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Garnet was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v2.2.0, published on 1 October 2026. The project has 12k stars on GitHub.

Garnet: open-source alternative to Upstash

About Garnet

Garnet is a remote cache-store from Microsoft Research. It adopts the RESP wire protocol, the one used by Redis, so existing Redis clients in most programming languages can talk to it without modification. That makes it a candidate for applications that already depend on Redis clients but want a different server implementation.

The project describes strong throughput and low latency, plus scalability, storage beyond memory, recovery, cluster sharding, key migration and replication. Newer previews add vector sets, offering approximate nearest-neighbor search backed by the DiskANN algorithm and the Tsavorite storage engine, and a range index for secondary lookups. Garnet is built on .NET and works on both Linux and Windows.

The code is written in C# and released under the MIT license, with documentation at microsoft.github.io/garnet. People who prefer not to operate it themselves can use Azure Cosmos DB Garnet Cache, which offers Garnet as a managed caching service. The repository contains everything needed to build and run the server.

Key features

Works with unmodified Redis clients via RESP
Cluster sharding with key migration
Replication and recovery support
Storage larger than memory
Vector sets preview using DiskANN
Cross-platform .NET implementation

Good fit for

→Replacing a Redis server behind existing clients
→Low-latency caching for large services

Built with: C#
Tags: cache; key-value; redis-compatible; dotnet; low-latency; cluster; microsoft

Garnet: questions and answers

What is Garnet used for?: Garnet is a Microsoft Research cache-store that speaks the Redis protocol, offering clustering, replication and persistence on a cross-platform .NET base. It is a good fit for replacing a Redis server behind existing clients and low-latency caching for large services.
Is Garnet open source?: Yes. Garnet is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at microsoft/garnet and is written mainly in C#.
Is Garnet free?: Yes. Garnet is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available.
Can I self-host Garnet?: Yes. Garnet can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Garnet an alternative to?: Garnet is an open-source alternative to Upstash, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon MemoryDB and Google Memorystore. Other open-source alternatives to Upstash include Redis, Dragonfly and Valkey.
Is Garnet actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Garnet was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v2.2.0, published on 1 October 2026. The project has 12k stars on GitHub.