News

2 Azure Cache Services Ending in 2016

• By Kurt Mackie
• 12/08/2015

Microsoft has decided to stop offering a couple of Azure cache services in favor of its Azure Redis Cache service.

Microsoft will end its Azure In-Role Cache Service and its Azure Managed Cache Service on Nov. 30, 2016. Organizations should switch over to using Microsoft's Azure Redis Cache service instead as it "provides more features and a better value overall," according to Microsoft's announcement late last week.

Redis is an open source NoSQL key-value database. Microsoft runs it as a service as part of its Azure cloud resources. The Microsoft Azure Redis Cache service is typically used by organizations with Web applications that need persistent data access for their operations, such as applications that perform financial transactions online.

Azure Redis Cache is now available in a new Premium offering, in addition to the current Standard and Basic product lines. The Premium offering is arriving a bit later and was announced by Microsoft last week. Microsoft is planning for Premium "general availability" pricing to take effect on Jan. 1, 2016, although the rates already can be seen at this page.

The Standard and Premium Azure Redis Cache offerings both come with a 99.9 percent service level agreements for the cache endpoints. However, only the Premium offering has a data persistence feature that provides assurances against data loss, according to Microsoft's announcement.

The Azure Redis Cache Premium offering runs on faster hardware than the Standard and Basic offerings. The throughput of the Premium offering also is higher.

Azure Redis Cache is Microsoft's recommendation for Windows Server AppFabric 1.1, which is getting deprecated. Microsoft plans to end product support for AppFabric 1.1 in April 2022, which is an extension from an earlier proposed support end date in April 2016.