In Windows Azure Shared Caching, unable to spin up a cache in Regions US East or US West - why?

Question

Trying to get started using the Windows Azure Shared Cache for session data. Plenty of helpfiles both at Microsoft and elsewhere suggest that cache should be in same geographical region as website. (I am not, at this point, using VMs or Cloud Services, only shared websites on Azure).

Problem is that when I go to the legacy portal, as directed, in order to create a new cache, the interface will only allow me to select "United States (North/Central)" and "United States (South/Central)" The selections for "United States (East)" and "United States (West)" are available, but if selected I am unable to request a cache there. But all my other Azure services are in United States (East).

I suppose I can set up a Cache in a different region than where my website is, but that seems unadvised. I looked into moving my website from "US East" to "US North Central", but regional availability for websites is only "US East" and "US West", exactly the two options that are NOT available for Caching!

Suggestions?

Please know that my firm is not ready to go to cloud services/VMs and role-based caching at this time.

Answer 1

While I can't speak for the Shared Cache team regarding which data centers will support Shared Cache, I can point you to this MSDN forum article , from March 2013, where a Moderator pointed out that "Azure Shared Caching is not available in all data centers."

Just to double-check, I tried creating a Shared Cache and also saw that selecting US East or US West results in the "not in region" message.

Just curious if you've tried using SQL Database for your session state cache provider, since you can, indeed, instantiate a database instance in US East and US West. The advantage of SQL Database: No transaction quota (which the Shared Cache has on an hourly basis, and once you exceed the quota, your cache becomes unavailable until the top of the next hour).