Microsoft Open Technologies, a Microsoft subsidiary that launched earlier this month, has released its first project: a new version of the Windows port of Redis begun by Microsoft. However, it’s not yet production ready.

Previously Microsoft submitted a patch to provide Windows support in the main Redis project, based on an existing port of Redis to Windows by Dušan Majkić, but the patch was rejected by Redis maintainer Salvatore “antirez” Sanfilippo. Sanfilippo wrote at the time:

I don’t think Redis running under win32 is a very important feature. It is cool to have a win32 port that can be used for testing, as we had before, and as we have in a different implementation thanks to the Microsoft patch, so developers using Windows can easily test Redis and develop their projects. But what is the point in providing a production quality win32 port?

But as Microsoft pushes forward with Azure, the company is dedicating resources towards porting open source platforms – Apache Hadoop and Node.js in particular – to Windows. It seems that Microsoft has two strategies here:

1. Compete with other cloud providers by pushing the higher level platforms and keep the operating system out sight: “Who cares if it’s running Windows or Linux, as long as it’s running Redis/Node.js/Hadoop?” Building ports of these technologies in-house builds Microsoft’s competence and authority in these areas and may help the company compete. Microsoft has won over companies like Movideo and Klout, but it remains to be seen how successful this strategy will be.
2. Keep Microsoft’s existing developer ecosystem from drifting to other operating systems by providing the newer open source development tools that are proving popular on *nix based operating systems. In particular Microsoft is doubling down on JavaScript, releasing a JavaScript library for Hadoop and the ability to extend Office using JavaScript. However, this comes at the risk of alienating those developers who have deeply invested in .NET and other Microsoft technologies.

In short, the strategy is to bring new people to Windows by abstracting away the operating system, and to keep existing developers around by providing the latest tools.

According to tk’s announcement:

The major improvements in this latest version involve the process of saving data on disk. Redis on Linux uses an OS feature called Fork/Copy On Write. This feature is not available on Windows, so we had to find a way to be able to mimic the same behavior without changing completely the save on disk process so as to avoid any future integration issues with the Redis code.

The version we released today implements the Copy On Write process at the application level: instead of relying on the OS we added code to Redis so that some data structures are duplicated in such a way that Redis can still serve requests from clients while saving data on disk (thus achieving the same effect of Fork/Copy On Write does automatically on Linux).

You can check out a comparison of Majkić’s Redis port with Microsoft’s AppFabric here.