How does windows azure websites handle session?

Question

I was investigating one of the new offerings in windows azure. Specifically "Websites" and i'm not able to find anything about how it handles session data. Does anybody know? I moved the slider up to 2 instances and it all seems to "just work", but I would feel better about using it if I knew for sure it was sharing session data (or not?)

Answer 1

If you'd like to learn more about the architecture of Windows Azure Web Sites, I would suggest watching this session from TechEd 2012 Windows Azure Web Sites: Under the Hood

Answer 2

You have some options to solve this problem

1. sql solution

2. table storage solution

3. memcache solution

Sql is the classic solution. Sql handles all sessions with classic sql requests.

Table storage works wonders (in my experience). It's really easy to scale and really simple to implement (just a few lines of code on your webconfig).

Memcache solution is the best solution. Azure provides a cluster of "cache servers" to store session (or other serializable objects). It's really easy to scale and works really really fast. I am using this solution on my production environments with 0 problems and a really good performance results.

In order to implement Memcache, you just need to add those lines on your web.config:

<configuration>
    <configSections>        
        <section name="dataCacheClients" type="Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Caching.DataCacheClientsSection, Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Caching.Core" allowLocation="true" allowDefinition="Everywhere"/>
        <!-- more config sections here -->
    </configSections>
    <dataCacheClients>
    <dataCacheClient name="default">
        <hosts>
        <host name="YOUR_NAME_HERE.cache.windows.net" cachePort="YOUR_PORT_HERE"/>
        </hosts>
    <securityProperties mode="Message">
            <messageSecurity authorizationInfo="YOUR_KEY_HERE">
                            </messageSecurity>
            </securityProperties>
    </dataCacheClient>
</dataCacheClients>
<!-- more configurations here -->

Summary

If you don't care about the costs and you wish to archieve best performance possible, go for memcache solution. If you need to keep your costs really low, go for table storage.