Microsoft has open-sourced the Project Zipline data compression technology used in their Azure cloud services. Project Zipline is capable of compressing datasets with up to two times the compression ratio of the Zlib-L4 64KB model.
At a time when the scale of data collection and storage has increased, the need for strong data compression is ever-present. Another challenge faced by cloud providers (and anyone running a server, actually) is the system resource requirements of data compression and decompression. Both processes are CPU intensive.
Microsoft touts the algorithm’s improved throughput and lower latency, which may impact server performance positively. Compression is not only used for large datacenters, but on small droplets/other server instances running anything from a WordPress blog to a large website like Facebook.
Common uses of compression among websites such as blogs include the compression of images, JavaScript libraries, and CSS libraries, making them smaller so they can be served to users faster (and with less data usage)!
