Microsoft and Amazon are going head to head as both companies compete by updating their cloud caching services. Recently, Microsoft’s Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) had their caching services updated: AWS has expanded ElastiCache with Redis, and Windows Azure promises faster response times on Windows Azure Cache.

Redis is a popular open-source caching engine with which AWS has upgraded its ElastiCache service. AWS also offers Memcached, on object storage cache. Just like Memcached, Redis offers an in-memory key-value store and its benefit includes ability to offer multi-zone redundancy.

AWS is also organizing Web seminar on Sept. 26 in order to help administrators on using Redis.

On the other hand, Microsoft recently previewed an update of its Windows Azure Cache, which now features larger cache sizes and reduced latency. As compared to the previous version, the new caching service runs on its own servers, instead of alongside the application itself, where it would use memory otherwise dedicated to the application.

Windows Azure Cache Service can be used with any Windows Azure application, and will be soon available on Windows Azure Mobile Services as well. You can allocate up to 150GB of in-memory data objects or content, and dynamically adjust memory without rebooting the supported application.

A point of difference between AWS and Windows Azure Cache is that latter does not support Memcached, but the company is planning to add support for Memcached in the future.

Cache in the cloud can be just as important as cache in the datacenter

When working towards producing a highly scalable product, especially one that must scale globally as well “horizontally or virtually” as new customers come on board means moving a lot of data. Developers and software uses cache as a rapid storage for temporary or quickly needed information especially when that information needs to be updated frequently or relies on a slower underlying technology (such as a database.)

Cloud caching enables a sort of backstop against slow-updating database and can serve a multitude of customers; but it can also help alleviate latency times for working with multiple customers across large regions–which is especially true for any enterprise that has a global market, such as mobile app providers.

Cache needs to be reliable, resilient, fast, and capable of rapidly synchronizing itself with the underlying architecture (or at least enabling quick access to the data when it knows its up-to-date and lowering wait time as it updates.)

Amazon and Microsoft both offer powerful services that give applications powerful abilities. It’s a little strange that Azure Cloud doesn’t provide memcached (as its an open source standard most developers grow up with) but the eventual addition of it should open up to more customers. However, since Azure cache works with Azure already Microsoft developers will already have the product at hand. The use of Redis by Amazon acts a great deal like memcached and will probably be easy for developers to migrate to as well.