AppFabric Cache – Installation Modes

The AppFabric Caching service installation can be done in 3 different modes, each mode has its own function, together the 3 modes form a complete distributed caching system which can effectively handle caching in a distributed environment. AppFabric takes care of replicating the cache defined in one cache server to the other servers, so that the cache data placed in one of the servers in the cluster can be accessed from the other servers in the cache cluster.

The following are the modes in which the AppFabric caching can be installed.

AppFabric – Pre Requisites

AppFabric is available for free and can be downloaded from the following Microsoft’s site

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=15848

The following are the pre requisites for installing AppFabric caching.

AppFabric Caching Cluster Configuration

A AppFabric cache cluster includes a number of cache host servers which jointly form a cache cluster, the configuration details of the cache host servers should be placed in a common location, each time a cache host starts it gets the basic configuration information and starts operating.

AppFabric provides the following options to store configuration information.

AppFabric Caching Architecture

AppFabric Caching can handle multiple cache servers running parallel, the individual cache servers form a cluster, the client web servers see the cache as a single cache cluster and not as individual cache servers. AppFabric caching takes care of synchronizing the cache handling between the various cache servers.

Each cache server contains a Cache Host windows service, which takes care of the managing the cache and replicating cache data across the various servers in the cache cluster.

The following diagram shows the AppFabric caching architecture in a cache cluster environment.

What is AppFabric Caching

AppFabric provides a distributed caching platform, used to develop highly scalable applications which require a cache to provide performance optimization. The caching platform can be scaled out by adding multiple cache servers to the architecture.

AppFabric caching platform takes care of sharing the cached objects across the cache servers automatically, and makes sure that the cache objects added to one of the instances is made available in all other instances.