In-Role Cache and Azure Managed Cache Services will be retired next year

A few days ago Azure team announced that they will retire Azure Managed Cache and In-Role Cache will not be supported anymore. In this post we will take a look on why this is happening and what could this decision affect us.
The official announced can be found on the following link: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-managed-cache-and-in-role-cache-services-to-be-retired-on-11-30-2016/

Azure Managed Cache Services is a service that allow us to use a cache solution as a service. From our application, we would only need a 'connection string' to the cache services. Using this information we could store or retrieve any kind of content from cache.
In-Role Cache allows us to cache content in the memory of our role (web/worker role). A part of the memory can be configured to be used for cache. The data that is cached in In-Role Cache is synchronized automatically between multiple instances of our role.
This two cache solutions offered by Microsoft Azure are used very often by small to medium size application that needs a simple solution to cache content.
I'm using Azure Managed Cache in 6 application that are hosted on Azure and works great. The cache is not super fast, but it is enough for the use cases that we need to cover. For cases when we need to be super fast and we have a more complex use case we use Redis Cache. Personally I never used In-Role Cache in production. I played with it on different occasion, but nothing more than that.

From November 30, 2016 Microsoft Azure will retire Azure Managed Cache Service completely. This means that if you are using this service that you should start to plan and prepare a migration to another cache service like Azure Redis Cache. On the same date, the support for In-Role Cache will end.
It is important to know that on all public Azure Regions, China and US Government Datacenters , Azure Redis Cache is available and ready to use.

A normal question is: 'Why this is happening?". This is happening because both services of cache are using Windows Server AppFabric 1.1, for which the support will end next year. It is normal that all services that are constructed over AppFabric 1.1 features to be affected.

The migration from Azure Managed Cache Service or In-Role cache to Azure Redis Cache can be made easily. Not only this, but all features that were available in this two cache solution can be found in Azure Redis Cache. There are some small things that cannot be ported directly 1 to 1, but are isolated and simple to migrate. A post about this topic will come next week.

Even if this change may affect some clients, overall this is a good change. From a cache perspective, there were a lot of options on Azure, with similar performance and features. For clients is pretty hard to decide when you have 2 or 3 services with the same functionality, features and costs.