Introduction

The Windows Azure Platform is a Microsoft cloud platform used to build, host and scale web applications through Microsoft datacenters. Customers are given privilege to scale VM instance up and down in the matter of a few minutes. Although this flexibility would indeed very useful, it may affect the way we architect and design the solution.

One of the essential aspect that we would need to take into account is session state. Traditionally, if you are running one single server, going for default InProc session state will just work fine. However, when you have more than one server hosting your application, this may be a challenge for us. Similarly this scenario applies to Cloud environment.

This article describes various options to handle Session State in Windows Azure. For each option, I’ll start with common introduction as brief information, follow by various advantages and disadvantages, and finalize by recommendation and suggestion.

As prerequisite, I would assume the readers are familiar with the basic, what Session is and how it works…

Various Options to Manage Session State in Windows Azure

1. InProc Session

InProc session state maybe is the best performed option (in term of access time) and the default when you are not specifying one. It actually stores the session in web server’s memory. Therefore, the access is very fast since hitting to memory is extremely speedy.

I had a post last November 2011 that described In-proc Session does not work well in Windows Azure. Well, in fact, it may be fine if you just run on single instance. However, I won’t recommend you to just spin up single instance at production environment, unless you tolerate some downtime. To meet the 99.95% SLA, we are required to spin at least 2 instance per role.

Advantages

• Very fast access since the session information is stored in memory (RAM)
• No extra cost as it will be using your VM’s memory

Disadvantages

• As mentioned above, this will only valid for single instance. If you use more than one instance, the inconsistency will happen.

*The rest of the option will tackle the single instance issue as they use centralized medium.

2. Table Storage Session Provider

Table Storage Provider is actually a subset of Windows Azure ASP.NET Providers written by some Microsoft folks. The Session Provider is actually a custom provider that is compiled into a dll, centralize the session information in Windows Azure Table Storage. You may download the package from here. Clicking on the “Browse Code” section will show you pretty comprehensive example of how to implement this on your project.

The way how it actually works is to store each session in Table Storage as could be seen in below screenshot. Each record will have its expired column that describe the expired time of each session if there’s no interaction from the user.

Advantages

• Cost effective. In essence, Windows Azure Storage only charge you $ 0.15 per GB per month. 

Disadvantages

• Not officially supported by Microsoft
• Performance may not be very good. I experience a pretty bad experience on performance when using Windows Azure Storage provider.
• Need to clear unused session.

For each time a session (with properties including expiry time) is created on a session table. For the subsequent request, it will be check against the table to see if it exists. For the scenario we need delete the record which expiry time equals or older than current time. This is to enable timeout when there is no activity against session.

In order to automatically delete expired session, most of the time we use Windows Azure Worker Role to perform the batch activity.

SQL Azure Session Provider

SQL Azure Session Provider is actually a modified version of SQL Server Session Provider provided some changes that had been made on TSQL function, in order to comply SQL Azure. It is identified some issue on the original script and some folk posted the resolution or you can download it

Advantages

• Cost effective. Although it may not be cost effective compare to table storage, it’s still pretty affordable, especially when combining it into the main database.

Disadvantages

• Not official support by Microsoft
• Need to clear unused session

For each time a session (with properties including expiry time) is created on a session table. For the subsequent request, it will be check against the table to see if it exists. For the scenario we need delete the record which expiry time equals or older than current time. This is to enable timeout when there is no activity against session.

In order to automatically delete expired session, most of the time we use Windows Azure Worker Role to perform the batch activity.

AppFabric Caching

AppFabric Caching is actually the recommended option and officially supported by Microsoft. AppFabric Caching is distributed in-memory cache service. It is automated provisioned based on Windows Server AppFabric Caching Technology.

Advantages

• In memory cache, very fast access
• Officially supported by Microsoft

Disadvantages

• The cost is relatively high. The pricing starts from $ 45 per month for 128 MB and all the way up to $ 325 per month for 4 GB.

Conclusion

To conclude this discussion, there’re actually multiple ways of managing session in Windows Azure. All of them have pros and cons. It’s actually up to us to decide which one to use that fits better circumstance.

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