Redis is an extremely popular and powerful in-memory key-value store supporting a wide variety of data structures. Microsoft Azure has recently announced support for Redis Cache and the applications in Azure can leverage it as a high performance caching platform. Currently in preview mode, Azure Redis Cache is limited to a maximum size of 1GB. The platform can also be configured for replication providing high availability.

Configuring Redis Cache is very simple. First login to your Microsoft Azure Preview Portal and click “New” from the menu options.

You will find the Redis Cache (Preview) option in the list and select it to configure Redis Cache. In the next dialog, specify a DNS name for the cache service. If required specify the resource group, location and select the pricing tier (at present options are 250 MB and 1 GB).

You are now ready to access the cache from your application. Redis supportsclients in several languages including C# and Node.js. StackExchange.Redis is a popular client in C#. Use the StackExchange.Redis NuGet package to install the necessary client components required to connect to Azure Redis Cache.

The following code snippet illustrates the usage of the Redis cache provider.

var connection = ConnectionMultiplexer.Connect("[specify the connection string to Azure Redis Cache Service]");            var cacheProvider = connection.GetDatabase();            cacheProvider.StringSet("key","value");

You can now use it as you would any other cache, but with addition of the powerful features of Redis.