While talking to a startup company today, they asked me about the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching service, trying to replace a Redis self-managed deployment. The conversation steered specifically towards atomic transactions and update modes. I found a really good white paper from Scott Seely that talks about the two update patterns supported: optimistic and pessimistic. The main difference between the two is that the latter uses locks, the former doesn’t. In addition to this topic, the articles touches on cache security, expiration, and how to properly manage this service in the cloud. It can be found here:
Architecting Applications to use Windows Azure AppFabric Caching
For more information about the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching service, please also visit this page.