Cache strategy in Azure Web Sites

Question

I have a simple project that I'd like to publish to Azure Web Sites. I need to do some basic caching of a few values to speed things up a bit.

What's the right strategy for caching data in this scenario? I guess that as long as I stay on free or reserved I can use simple standard web cache as it's a single machine, but what happens if I'd like to use shared a number of instances? Is distributed cache really available for web sites? What other options do I have for simple cache here?

Answer 1

According to this, it doesn't look like you could use the shared / distributed cache. Has that changed? Do you have a link that says Azure supports either of their 2 cache scenarios for websites?

As long as you only have 1 instance, you are right, using the normal outputCache should be okay. If you scale out to 2 or more instances, you may have to migrate from a Website to a Hosted Service in order to use either of the other 2 caching strategies. Azure has not been offering the full suite of features with websites that they do with hosted services.