AppFabric Coming Apart? 5 Reasons to Move to Redis Labs

Microsoft recently announced that Microsoft AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server will be at the end of support on April 2, 2016. Less than a year away! Don’t panic yet, there is another, better solution.

Redis is the product of choice for thousands of developers worldwide who want to accelerate their applications. Redis is the fastest growing NoSQL datastore, that runs in-memory and delivers millions of transactions at sub millisecond latencies. Redis Labs provides enterprise class Redis: as a downloadable product Redis Labs Enterprise Cluster (RLEC) or as a seamlessly scalable, highly available service, Redis Cloud.

Here are the top 5 reasons to move applications using Microsoft AppFabric to Redis Cloud or Redis Labs Enterprise Cluster :

1. Performance: One of the biggest reasons to move is the blazing fast performance and versatility of Redis. While AppFabric performs simple GET and SET commands, Redis comes with a variety of data structures (strings, lists, hashes, sets, sorted sets) and a sophisticated set of commands, embedded Lua scripting and bit operations that helps you address more than high speed caching – it lets you implement high speed transactions, real time analytics, in-app social functionality, messaging, job and queue management and much more.
2. Scalability: The current AppFabric replacement offered by MS runs on Azure, however it is not a service that scales seamlessly like Redis Cloud. Redis Cloud with 4900+ customers to date is proven to be highly scalable and available and provides all the functionality of Redis with none of the deployment overhead. Also, if you don’t really want a cloud solution, RLEC (Redis Labs Enterprise Cluster) runs on-premises or wherever you are deployed and relieves you of any provisioning, configuring, scaling, clustering, monitoring – it fully automates all those tasks and makes it super-easy to deploy Redis clusters.
3. Portability: AppFabric is Windows and .Net specific while Redis supports many environments and languages.Thanks to our community, 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.
4. Built-in Monitoring: Both Redis Cloud and RLEC come with a dashboard to view different operational metrics as well as built-in alerts to receive notification on important events. This is very much more cumbersome with AppFabric and you would have had to use external tools to get the same level of manageability.
5. Ease of use: Redis is simple yet very sophisticated and used by thousands of developers worldwide. It is #3 among NoSQL database adoption (source:DBengines) and #12 among all tools used by developers (source:Stackshare). This means that a talent pool of Redis users and a worldwide community is always there to help!

RLEC is free to download and Redis Cloud has a free tier as well – so it is really easy to try out both those products.

If you have any questions about migrating from AppFabric to Redis Labs, our solutions consultants are always here to help. Email us at [email protected] and we can set up some time to walk you through the migration!