使相同的cookie在不同的Azure实例之间可读

Question

On my website, there is a registration form. After having filled this in, the user gets redirected to Azure ACS in order to log in. After having logged in, the user gets redirected back to my website and is to be registered and logged in.

The registration form's information is saved in a cookie before the user is transferred to ACS, in order to be read when the user returns. Azure might suddenly change server instance for my webrole, and it seems the cookie cannot be read in those cases. Since the user gets transferred to ACS, it seems I cannot store the registration information in a session. I think I need to use cookies. Is there any way to make the same cookie readable between different Azure instances? Or is there a better solution? Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

As with any website that's on more than one server, you'll need to store session data in a database or other storage that's available across all instances.

Here's a blog post that details the options you have available in Azure Web Roles: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cie/archive/2013/05/17/session-state-management-in-windows-azure-web-roles.aspx

That being said, I don't know why a cookie wouldn't work between Azure instances. What are you doing to set/read the cookie?

Answer 2

Firstly, you can use session variables in Windows Azure Cloud Services like any other web application . What you can't do is use In-Proc session state management . As @CoderDennis mentioned, you would need to store session state at a place where it is accessible to all the instances.

My recommendation would be to use Windows Azure Role Based Cache and use that session state provider for session state management. You may find this link helpful to do that: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/services/cache/net/how-to-in-role-cache/#store-session .

Coming to cookies based solution, that would work as well. Remember that all your instances sit behind a load balancer, there's nothing special you would need to do read cookies between Azure instances as all of the instances will share same domain name.

Answer 3

For shared storage, you could store the data in an azure table instead of a database. Depending on your requirements, you may not need a fully fledged DB to do this. Azure tables are reliable, scale out well and are very simple to use and manage.