Azure Network and Caching Services

Azure delivers network and caching infrastructure services for distributed applications. The services perform tasks such as balancing load across application instances to limit downtime and improve performance. Organizations running applications on Azure might want to use the Azure implementations of these services because they will simplify management and improve performance over alternatives. However, some Azure infrastructure services are not yet available for production use or are not yet integrated with current Azure management tools.

Azure Hosted and Managed Infrastructure

Four services are particularly important for Internet-facing Web applications and services, as well as back-end distributed applications using standard Internet infrastructure. (For an illustration, see “Azure Network and Caching Overview“.)

None of these services is novel: Organizations can buy similar services from providers other than Microsoft, or host them in Azure virtual machine (VMs) themselves. However, the Azure versions of these services run in the same data centers as Azure applications, and they can be deployed and updated as parts of an Azure-hosted application, using the new Azure Resource Manager systems management component. Consequently, for Azure applications, these services can offer lower latency or simpler management than alternatives.