Windows Azure Caching Service: Distributed Cache Service Preview Experience

This morning, we released a batch of important Windows Azure updates. Includes the following new features:

· Dedicated caching services: we will announce new distributed, proprietary, high-performance cache service previews.

· Auto Scaling: Automatic scaling based on planned web sites and virtual machines to provide richer historical records.

· Web site: The new Web server log supports saving HTTP logs to a storage account.

· Action log: New filtering options are supported on the action log.

All of these updates are now available for immediate use (note: Some are still previewed). The following are detailed information about them.

Windows Azure Caching Service: Our new distributed Cache Services preview

Today, I am pleased to announce that the new Windows Azure Cache Service Preview has been released-it is the latest addition to Windows Azure services. The new Windows Azure caching service enables you to easily deploy dedicated, high-performance, distributed caching, storing your Windows Azure application data in data memory and significantly improving its scalability and performance.

The new Windows Azure caching service can be used in any type of Windows Azure application-including virtual machines hosted on Windows or Linux, and those deployed as Windows Azure Web sites and windows Azure Cloud Service Application. Windows Azure Mobile services will also be supported in the future.

You can instantiate a dedicated Windows Azure cache service instance for each of your applications, or share a single caching service across multiple applications. The latter is especially useful when you want to deploy your cloud back-end solution partitions to multiple units-now they can easily share and collaborate on the same cached data.

Benefits of Windows Azure caching service

Here are some of the benefits of the new Windows Azure caching service:

· Caching services (VMS, Web sites, mobile services, cloud services) can be used from any application type

· Each cache service instance separates/isolates other customers and is deployed within a dedicated virtual machine-which means you get fast, predictable performance.

· Caching services do not have quotas or throttling behavior-you can access your dedicated caching services as much as possible.

· Each cached service instance that you create, such as today's preview, can store up to 150GB of memory data objects or content. Can grow or shrink dynamically without having to redeploy your application to use the memory cache service instance.

· Web sites, VMS, and cloud services can retrieve End-to-end objects (including network roundtrip caching services and backgrounds) from the cache service at an average speed of about 1ms. Projects can be plugged into end-to-end caching at around 1.2ms (meaning that the Web site/vm/cloud service keeps objects of remote caching services and receives ACK End-to-end returns within 1.2ms).

· Each cached service instance runs as a highly available service across multiple servers. This means that your caching service will remain available, even if a server crashes, or an instance of the virtual machine needs to be upgraded.

· The virtual machines running a cached service instance are managed as a Windows Azure service-which means that the patches and lifetimes of these instances are handled by our team, and the user does not have to worry. This allows you to focus on creating great applications without having to worry about managing the details of the facility.

· The new caching service supports the same. NET Cache API, today we use the Role caching option to support cloud services as well. Therefore, the code you write is already compatible with the new managed caching service.

· The new caching service provides support for built-in ASP.net session state and ASP.net output caching. This makes it easier for you to extend your ASP.net application across multiple Web servers, sharing session state and/or caching page output, regardless of which client opens which server.

· The new caching service supports whether your application uses a separate cache service instance or sharing an instance of a caching service in multiple applications (for easy data sharing and application partitioning). This is useful when your application spans several deployment units.

Create a caching service

With the Windows Azure Management portal, you can easily create a new caching service by using the new-> Data Services-> cache option:

In the screenshot above, we specify a new premium cache that wants to create a 5GB in "North Europe" called "Scottgucache". Once we click the "Create a new Cache" button, it takes a few minutes to configure: