Hello there
Microsoft released on Azure the Redis Cache
Redis is a key/value database engine widely diffused across the world and available on lot of platforms
On Microsoft Azure, the in-role caching service and the Managed Cache service made the primary cache offering up to september 2014, when Redis has been added in general availability
accordingly with Microsoft, this is the release article
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/general-availability-azure-redis-cache/
the first thing that make me crazy here is, does an active/passive system solution made by two systems in failover configuration be named distributed system?
I mean, does a no-scalable cache system, although SLA compliant because of the failover, actually be named distributed cache?
I don’t know if Microsoft did a step back by itself or if we, as community mans who spread news about Azure&Co, misunderstood Microsoft’s guidance about cloud caching
API
the available API from .NET is extremely complete and complex if compared to the easy one available for AppFabric Cache and Managed/In-role Azure cache. another must-say is that with all other caching services from Azure we have a single shared API, while using Redis all such API chages
here a basic example
var connection = ConnectionMultiplexer.Connect(“[MYCACHE].redis.cache.windows.net,ssl=true,password=[MYKEY]”);
var proxy = connection.GetDatabase();//get a string value
var value = proxy.StringGet(“key”);//put a string value
//lifetime at 1 minute
proxy.StringSet(“key”, “value”, TimeSpan.FromMinutes(1));
the first BIG limitation of Redis is visible right above
the API supports only primitive values accordingly to the documentation useful to put anything in the cache database by serializing (at our cost)
some other type is available, but usually for set of data… I’ll go deeper in next posts
stay tuned