About Windows Azure Shared Caching

Windows Azure Shared Caching enables you to easily provision a cache in the cloud, to be used from any applications or services that could benefit from caching. To provision a cache, you sign up for one of the Shared Caching offerings on the Windows Azure Management Portal. Each offering is differentiated by the amount of memory available for Caching. The offerings start at 128 MB and increase in increments up to 4 GB. However, as a multitenant service, Shared Caching also has quotas for other network resources. These quotas also vary with each Shared Caching offering.

Shared Caching is one of two options for using Caching in a cloud service. The other option is to host Caching within your own web or worker roles. For information, see Caching in Windows Azure.

Note
Windows Azure Caching features are a subset of the features provided by the on-premise caching solution of Microsoft AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server. 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 Microsoft AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server.

Shared Caching Quick Start

The following list describes the steps to quickly begin learning and using Shared Caching with your Windows Azure applications.

1. If you do not have a Windows Azure account, you can sign up at the Windows Azure Management Portal.
   
   
2. Then you can create your first cache.
   
   
3. You can learn more about developing your own application that use the caching API directly and that use the ASP.NET session state and output caching providers.
   
   
4. If you are familiar with on-premises caching with Microsoft AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server, there are important feature differences and API differences that you should review.
   
   
5. Learn how to deploy your cache-enabled application to the cloud.
   
   
6. Finally, review information about managing your caches, which includes understanding cache quotas.
   
   

Tip
For more information about how to plan for caching requirements and quotas, see Capacity Planning for Caching in Windows Azure.

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