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        Microsoft Shuttering Two Azure Cache Services in 2016
        
        
        
			- By Kurt Mackie
- December 08, 2015
Microsoft is planning to sunset  a couple of its Azure cache services next year in favor of its Azure Redis Cache service. 
Microsoft will end its Azure In-Role Cache Service and its  Azure Managed Cache Service on Nov. 30, 2016, according to Microsoft's announcement  late last week. Organizations should switch over  to using Microsoft's Azure Redis Cache service instead as it "provides  more features and a better value overall."
Redis is an open source NoSQL key-value database. Microsoft  runs it as a service as part of its Azure cloud resources. The Microsoft Azure  Redis Cache service is typically used by organizations with Web applications  that need persistent data access for their operations, such as applications  that perform financial transactions online.
Azure Redis Cache is now available in a new Premium  offering, in addition to the current Standard and Basic product lines. The Premium  offering is arriving a bit later and was announced by Microsoft last week. Microsoft  is planning for Premium "general availability" pricing to take effect  on Jan. 1, 2016, although the rates already can be seen at this page.
The Standard and Premium Azure Redis Cache offerings both come  with a 99.9 percent service level agreements for the cache endpoints. However,  only the Premium offering has a data persistence feature that provides  assurances against data loss, according to Microsoft's announcement.
The Azure Redis Cache Premium offering runs on faster  hardware than the Standard and Basic offerings. The throughput of the Premium  offering also is higher. 
Azure Redis Cache is Microsoft's recommendation for Windows  Server AppFabric 1.1, which is getting deprecated. Microsoft plans to end  product support for AppFabric 1.1 in April 2022, which is an extension from  an earlier proposed support end date in April 2016.
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
            
        
        
                
                    About the Author
                    
                
                    
                    Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.