Does azure support things like mongodb and redis?

Question

Can you use mongodb and redis/memcached with azure?

I'm guessing no but just want to make sure.

It turns out they do support things other than .net, are they using linux servers then?

Answer 1

You can very easily run mongodb in Windows Azure. I presented this at MongoSV - video here.

EDIT: In December 2011, 10gen published their official MongoDB+Azure code on github. This contains a project for replica-sets, as well as a demo ASP.NET MVC application (taken from the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit) that uses a replica set for its storage.

Standalone servers are straightforward, except you have to deal with scale-out: you can't have multiple instances of a standalone server simultaneously, so you'll need to plan for this: take all but one out of the load balancer, or only launch mongod if you can acquire the Cloud Drive lock.

Replicasets are doable, as I demonstrated at MongoSV. However, I didn't cover the intricacies of graceful shutdown of a replicaset to ensure zero data loss.

You can run memcached as well - see David Aiken's post about this. Note: Now that the AppFabric Cache service is live, you should look into the pros/cons of using that over memcached. Cost-wise, AppFabric Cache should run much less, as you don't have to pay for role instances to host your cache. More info about AppFabric Cache here.