Implementing Window Azure Cloud Services Web Role With Shared Cache Dedicated Roles?

Question

We(our company) is hosting a asp.net C# Cloud Services with a Web Role for a Reporting WebSites. Unfortunately, usage of the reporting Website is growth that original is only hosting with Medium Size VM and find out its having a memory leak that cause the Cloud Services is always down and stop working. End up we move to A7 VM(Okay, thats expensive) that solved our problem for 2-3 month.Somehow, new stuff develop new function develop that end up the memory is more than enough(its 56GB RAM) but the process is not really can fulfilled such expensive usage in the same time.

Looking for solution on the web and found out there was a shared cache that can be used. We decided to move from A7 to XM VM (A7 not supported shared cache) and with a Dedicated Roles For Shared cahce.

What we wish to achieve is load balance between few instances(if one down, it will redirect to another instances) and having the dedicated roles stored all of our session stuff.Am i going the correct direction for this?

And if yes, how to achieve this? I look into this and is that really need to sign up a preview program for cache services for using this?

Appreciate for the advice and please point out my mistake if any.

**Somehow, after reading stuff from web i found out the above mention method is a new method and the old ways is In-Role Cache that i can see it from here. Is that possible to used this method for sharing Session State among multiple instances even if one of the instances is down and route to another instances that are available and used back the session?

Answer 1

The best option for you is to use the Windows Azure Cache Service (Preview). This will let you share session state among multiple instances of your application.

You will need to sign up for the preview service. the cache core is mature and customers are encouraged to use this service in their production applications.

This service lets you use the cache from multiple cloud services, allowing you to share data across applications too. Also, this removes the dependency for you to use XL VMs just because In-Role Cache wasn't supported on A7.

Also, to be clear, Cache has 3 flavors - 1. Shared Caching - This is a multi-tenant service and is being deprecated 2. In-Role Caching - Here the cache is deployed in your cloud service and can only be used from within the cloud service. This is of two types - Co-Located & Dedicated. 3. Cache Service (preview) - The newly released service.

There is nothing called Dedicated Shared Cache. :)