AppFabric Comes Apart: Great Reason to Move to Redis

Microsoft recently announced that Microsoft AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server will be at the end of support on April 2, 2016. AppFabric, first introduced in 2010 has been a popular solution for web applications based on IIS and Windows Server.

If you’re an AppFabric user, you are likely using it as a key-value cache. A great alternative for this type of usage is what Redis has been pioneering – Redis, an in-memory data structure store is an advanced key-value database that runs entirely in memory. It derives its popularity based on its blazing fast performance and versatile data structures. Many of you might know an older generation memcached product, which is still widely used but less favored than Redis these days.If you’re considering replacements for Microsoft AppFabric, Redis could be a great choice because of the following reasons:

1. Performance: If you’re using Appfabric as a cache, you care about stable, high operations per second with minimal latency – Redis, purpose built for performance and simplicity achieves blazing fast speeds (over 1 m ops/sec with submillisecond latency) with both persistence and high availability.

2. High Availability: Redis offers persistence, replication and failover. Making your cache highly available may not sound like a big deal, but most disk based databases cannot cope with high speed data requests when the cache is down. In such cases, Redis can be used as an in-memory first responder database.

3. Versatility: Redis is much more than a key value store. In Redis, the data stored is not really opaque, it can be manipulated directly. Built-in commands and data structures in Redis mean that complex data processing tasks are handled directly within Redis, without having to ship data over the network for additional processing. Redis includes a variety of data structures (strings, lists, hashes, sets, sorted sets, bitmaps, hyperloglogs and geospatial  indexes) that support in-database, rapid fire analytics and are great for many use cases - maintaining counts, user session storage, high speed data ingest buffering, high speed transactions, leaderboards, lists, queues, finding common members, messaging and many more.

4. Portability: AppFabric is Windows and .Net specific while Redis supports many environments and languages. Backed by one of the largest open source communities in the world, Redis supports many languages including Python, Ruby, Java, PHP, Node, C, C#. So, if you have a mixed environment, now you can even extend your use of in-memory, high speed technologies.

5. Ease of use: Redis is simple and very easy to get started with. It is a small investment of time and effort with dramatic performance results –so it is almost always a crowd-pleaser.

Redis is provided by numerous vendors including Redis labs, Amazon Web Services, Heroku, Rackspace etc- so there is no danger of vendor lock-in either.