Redis Cache–Azure Plans

Azure Redis Cache, a secure data cache based on Open source Redis Cache, which will provide you a fully managed/serviced instance from Microsoft. Means you don’t have to bear the burden of managing the server/software patches etc..

What is Redis Cache?

Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache and message broker. It supports data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs and geospatial indexes with radius queries. Redis has built-in replication, Lua scripting, LRU eviction, transactions and different levels of on-disk persistence, and provides high availability via Redis Sentinel and automatic partitioning with Redis Cluster.

You can run atomic operations on these types, like appending to a string; incrementing the value in a hash; pushing an element to a list; computing set intersection, union and difference; or getting the member with highest ranking in a sorted set.

In order to achieve its outstanding performance, Redis works with an in-memory dataset. Depending on your use case, you can persist it either by dumping the dataset to disk every once in a while, or by appending each command to a log. Persistence can be optionally disabled, if you just need a feature-rich, networked, in-memory cache.

Redis also supports trivial-to-setup master-slave asynchronous replication, with very fast non-blocking first synchronization, auto-reconnection with partial resynchronization on net split.

5 High-level Use Cases of Redis Cache

1. Session Cache
One of the most apparent use cases for Redis is using it as a session cache. The advantages of using Redis over other session stores, such as Memcached, is that Redis offers persistence. You can maintain your applications user, role and authorization permission lists etc in Redis Cache for faster accessibility.

2. Full Page Cache (FPC)
Outside of your basic session tokens, Redis provides a very easy FPC platform to operate in. Going back to consistency, even across restarts of Redis instances, with disk persistence your users won’t see a decrease in speed for their page loads

3. Queues
Taking advantage of Redis’ in memory storage engine to do list and set operations makes it an amazing platform to use for a message queue. Interacting with Redis as a queue should feel native to anyone used to using push/pop operations with lists in programming languages such as C#, Python, Java, Php etc.

4. Leaderboards/Counting
Redis does an amazing job at increments and decrements since it’s in-memory. Sets and sorted sets also make our lives easier when trying to do these kinds of operations, and Redis just so happens to offer both of these data structures.

5. Pub/Sub
The use cases for Pub/Sub are truly boundless. You can use it for social network connections, for triggering scripts based on Pub/Sub events, and even a chat system built using Redis Pub/Sub!

[Courtesy: ObjectRocket]

Finally let us come to context of this blog to take you to essential pricing model from Microsoft:

Azure Redis Cache is available in three tiers:

• Basic—Single node, multiple sizes, ideal for development/test and non-critical workloads. The Basic tier has no SLA.
• Standard—A replicated cache in a two-node primary/secondary configuration managed by Microsoft, with a high-availability SLA.
• Premium—All of the Standard tier features, including a high-availability SLA, as well as better performance over Basic and Standard-tier caches, bigger workloads, disaster recovery, redis persistence, redis cluster, enhanced security and isolation through Virtual Network Deployment.
• ** Basic and Standard caches are available in sizes up to 53 GB(250 MB, 1 GB, 2.8 GB, 6 GB, 13 GB, 26 GB, 53 GB. )
• ** Premium caches are available in sizes up to 530 GB with more on request.

[Courtesy: Microsoft]

Useful Links:

• https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/services/cache/
• https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/azure-redis-cache-disaster-recovery-to-azure-tagging-support-elastic-scale-for-sqldb-docdb
• https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Azure-Friday/Azure-Redis-Cache-101-Introduction-to-Redis
• https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/updates/general-availability-azure-redis-cache-premium-tier/