Azure Cache and CDN

Caching is a common technique that aims to improve the performance and scalability of a system.

It does this by temporarily copying frequently accessed data to fast storage that’s located close to the application, eliminating to access data from original storage every time, this results in improving response times for client applications by serving data more quickly.

Azure Cache for Redis

Azure Cache for Redis provides a distributed, in-memory data store based on the Redis software for caching data.

• Its ability to process large volumes of application requests by keeping frequently accessed data in the server memory makes it a low-latency and high-throughput data storage solution for modern applications.
• It provides secure and dedicated Redis server instances and full Redis API compatibility.
• It allows replicating or syncing the cache in multiple regions in the world. One cache is primary, and other caches act as secondaries. The primary cache has read and write capabilities, but the secondary caches are read-only.
• Azure Cache for Redis offers both the Redis open-source (OSS Redis) and a commercial product from Redis Labs (Redis Enterprise) as a managed service.

Write data in Cache when not available

Read data from the cache to reduce latency

Common Application use-cases:

1. Static content cache: Using an in-memory cache provides quick access to static content like headers, footers, etc compared to backend datastores.
2. Data cache: Querying large databases can be complex and time taking, keeping data in cache while loading as needed and used can help effectively.
3. Session data: Like cookies, storing key-value data like users’ associated information (shopping cart, personal info, etc) provides faster loading time for websites.

Azure Content Delivery Network

Azure Content Delivery Network is a geographically distributed network of servers that can efficiently deliver web content to users.

• CDNs store cached content at strategically placed physical nodes across the world that are close to end users, to minimize latency.
• It can also accelerate dynamic content, which cannot be cached, by leveraging various network optimizations using CDN POPs.
• It provides better performance and improved user experience for end users, allowing large scaling to better handle the global load.

Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) includes four products:

• Azure CDN Standard from Microsoft
• Azure CDN Standard from Akamai
• Azure CDN Standard from Verizon
• Azure CDN Premium from Verizon

Azure Content Delivery Network

Characteristics:

1. Provides time to live property to remove infrequent and stale data to stay in cache until TTL duration present in (Cache-control header) expires.
2. Allow purge cached content explicitly, when publishing a new version of a web app or replacing any out-of-date assets.
3. Allow prepopulating the cache before any actual requests occur to improve the user experience when a large number of assets are required for an application.
4. Includes geo-filtering functionality that enables you to allow or block content in specific countries, based on the country code.

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P.S. It is part of Azure for August learning series, If you want to have a look at other relevant articles, Please checkout https://medium.com/@gargsourabh/list/azure-for-august-3ac4e674e226