New Azure Distributed Cache for Azure Websites in Reserved Instance Mode

Question

Something that seems to be absent from the otherwise great new features for Windows Azure (announced on June 7th), is the ability to define distributed caches for the reserved instances of a Website Cluster in Reserved Instance Mode.

As of now it seems to be only possible to create distributed caches for standalone webroles or worker roles. Does anyone know a workaround or know if this is something that is coming?

The reason why I'm asking this is because it forces me to create a dedicated worker role for caching and since I'm contrained by costs I can't afford another three instances just for caching. This leaves me with a caching service that's not fault tolerant when in reality my three Webroles hosting the Websites would be a) fault tolerant and b) could contribute enough memory to the distributed cache that I'd gain a much larger cache without a single point of failure as with a single caching workerrole.

Answer 1

This scenario is not supported as of today by Windows Azure Caching (Preview). Thanks for the feedback. I will take this up to the appropriate folks in our team to consider the same for future releases.

As mentioned by Jason and Win, for now you can use Windows Azure Shared Caching. Though you are right that it is limited in Size and has a quota system.

Answer 2

Previously known as the app fabric cache, I think this does what you want?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh914133.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg983488.aspx

Answer 3

You sure can create Dedicated Cache for windows Azure websites in reserved mode. As of now you may not be able to find how to create it in Windows Azure June SDK (1.7) however if really want to do it you need to accomplish it manually.

I had some discussion around this and after some digging I found that it can be done by understanding the dedicated cache in Windows Azure Web Role first and the migrating the references & configuration to your ASP.NET Website. Here are some steps you can follow to try it by yourself:

1. Create a Web Role with dedicate cache
2. Understand the references and configuration settings used for Dedicated Cache in web role
3. Now create your ASP.NET Website and migrate dedicated cache related settings and references to your Windows Azure website