Azure AppFabric caching
Azure AppFabric caching is a distributed in-memory caching service, which is provided as a provisionable service that can be consumed. What it means by "in-memory" is that the servers that are hosting the AppFabric caching service hold all the cached values in the memory. This allows the caching servers to return the cached results rapidly, rather than retrieving the values from the disk. The distributed part of the name refers to the fact that the cache is distributed over a number of AppFabric servers to ensure the durability of the data.
A typical scenario for using the caching service is to cache data that is retrieved from an SQL Azure Database, or an Azure Table storage. This can reduce the load on the data stores, and also improve the response time by quickly retrieving the cached values. The following diagram shows an example of this scenario. Each of the Azure web or worker role instances retrieve their values from the AppFabric cache. As explained in the...
