The Microsoft Azure Cloud is huge. Or should I say H-y-uuuuu-ge! It’s the largest cloud provider in the world with 38 Regions currently (30 online) spread across the globe, and Microsoft keeps adding more regions every few months. Microsoft has been betting the future of their Enterprise business on Azure since the initial General Availability in 2010, and they’ve increased their efforts over the last couple of years as the “Cloud Wars” have been speeding up.

Microsoft has been a little vague over the years. They publish how many Azure Regions there are, and what cities they’re located in. I’ve put together a map that plots the city location of each of the Azure Regions to help visualize things on the Region side of the equation. However, they don’t disclose the street addresses of the data centers, and until recently they haven’t exactly stated how many data centers make up the 38…

Azure Redis Cache helps your application become more responsive even as user load increases and leverages the low latency, high-throughput capabilities of the Redis engine. This separate distributed cache layer allows your data tier to scale independently for more efficient use of compute resources in your application layer.

Redis is an open source, BSD licensed, advanced key-value cache and store. It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets, bitmaps and hyperloglogs. Redis supports a set of atomic operations on these data types.

Microsoft Azure Redis Cache is based on this cache and store. It gives you access to a secure, dedicated Redis cache, managed by Microsoft, providing the best of both worlds: the rich features and ecosystem of Redis, and reliable hosting and monitoring by Microsoft.

You can use Redis from

Microsoft Azure Cache is a family of distributed, in-memory, scalable solutions that enable you to build highly scalable and responsive applications by providing super-fast access to your data. But what do you choose?

This post provides you with an overview of the options you have when you are considering caching technologies.

Microsoft Azure Cache is available in the following offerings.

• Azure Redis Cache
• Managed Cache Service
• In-Role Cache

Microsoft offers a strong recommended choice for these caches. “Microsoft recommends all new developments use Azure Redis Cache.”

That said, this post discusses each to give you a quick overview. This article also introduces you to one other cache.

• Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Here’s the short answer:

• Use Azure Redis Cache when you want to cache string, hashes, .NET classes, data.
• Use CDN when you want to cache audio, video, applications, images, and other files.

February 1, 2017 marks the 7th anniversary of when Microsoft turned on billing for the new Microsoft Azure service. Happy birthday Azure! Initially the service had a fraction of the features and services it has today. There’s been a tremendous growth on the platform over the years as a result of incredible investment by Microsoft.

Here’s a little timeline information about Microsoft Azure that you may or may not know:

• October 2008  – At the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC), Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie announces a new cloud computing platform from Microsoft called Windows Azure. The initial announcement includes the Azure services of: Cloud Services, and Blob Storage.
• March 2009 – Azure SQL Database service was announced.
• November 2009 – An updated Windows Azure CTP is released enabling Full Trust, PHP, Java, including a CDN CTP and more
• January 2010 – Windows Azure become Generally Available, currently free…