Windows Azure Caching Service

Windows Azure Caching enables you to easily provision a cache in the cloud, to be used from any applications or services that could benefit from caching. This includes a very common scenario of session state and output caching in ASP.NET. Caching increases performance by temporarily storing information from other backend sources. High performance is achieved by maintaining this cache in-memory across multiple cache servers. For a Windows Azure solution, caching can reduce the costs associated with database transactions in the cloud.

Note
Windows Azure Caching features are a subset of the features provided by the on-premise caching solution of Windows Server AppFabric. For more information, see Differences Between Caching On-Premises and in the Cloud.

Important

Windows Azure Caching is designed to be used with Windows Azure applications hosted in the cloud. This achieves the best throughput at the lowest latency. It is possible to test on-premises code that accesses a Windows Azure cache, but this design is not supported for production or valid for stress testing. On-premises applications can instead rely on an on-premises cache cluster that uses Windows Server AppFabric.

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