Robust integration with Redis on Azure and Polly

A client of mine requested an integration with OpenWeatherMap, so like so many times before it was a chance to think about how to make such an integration robust and performant. Its as common a task as they come, but also something that tends to end up feeling more complex than I would like. Having heard a lot of good things and played a bit with Redis I felt that it would be a good choice for providing super fast caching, while also allowing for more than basic key/value storage.

Getting off the ground

The project is already running on Azure, so it was an obvious choice to give Azures new Redis based caching service a go. As of now the service is still in preview, but the the level of caching I need I feel quite comfortable with it. Getting started was as easy as most things on Azure - click add, fill in a name and press go. As every day as this has become, I am still blown away by how easy and fast it is every time I need to provision a new VM or service – and a Redis cache is no different.

On the downside I am not quite convinced by the new Azure portal, because to me the UX feels more shiny than useful. As of this writing the caching service is only available through the portal, but inspite of my reservations it was easy to get going, and it provides a nice overview of requests, storage space used as well as cache hits and misses.

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