Does Windows Azure AppFabric Caching support High Availability?

Question

Back when AppFabric Caching was "Velocity", High Availability was "out of the box" option, and one of the few major features that made it stand out over other caching systems, namely memcached. However along the way "someone" decided it best to charge customers extra for HA by making it only available to Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition (or higher)... I am hopeful that Windows Azure AppFabric Caching does provide HA. I'm betting it must, if for no other reason because there is no "upgrade" option. Anyone know for certain?

As a secondary question, if anyone knows of the ETA for the production release of Windows Azure AppFabric Caching other than "2011", much appreciated. Roadmaps would be mighty handy... Instead most of us rely on Google to determine guesswork roadmaps :). Always been a big fan of MS products/services, but they could really use some additional "focus" in the area of Azure.

I understand AppFabric Caching is currently only in "alpha", and is only available via the Azure Labs portal.

Answer 1

Found the answer...

As we move towards commercial launch, we'll look to add many of the features that make Windows Server AppFabric Caching extremely popular, such as High Availability, the ability to emit notifications to clients when they need to refresh their local cache, and more.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazureappfabric/archive/2010/10/28/introduction-to-windows-azure-appfabric-caching-ctp.aspx

So no go for the time being, but looks like it is planned. Good enough for me, since it is not yet released anyway. But any ETA on release date (or quarter) would be very helpful for configuring my roadmap...