Azure Cache for Redis Retirement: What to Know and How to Prepare
Microsoft has announced the retirement of Azure Cache for Redis (Basic, Standard, Premium) and Azure Cache for Redis Enterprise/Enterprise Flash tiers. If you rely on these services today, it’s important to understand what’s changing, when, and how to prepare for a smooth transition to Azure Managed Redis. What’s Retiring and When? Azure Cache for Redis (Basic, Standard, Premium): Creation blocked for new customers: April 1, 2026 Creation blocked for existing customers: October 1, 2026 Retirement Date: September 30, 2028 Instances will be disabled starting October 1, 2028 Azure Cache for Redis Enterprise/Enterprise Flash: Creation blocked for all customers: April 1, 2026 Retirement Date: March 31, 2027 Instances will be migrated to Azure Managed Redis starting April 1, 2027 Existing instances will continue to run and receive regular maintenance until their respective retirement dates. More information here. Why Move to Azure Managed Redis? Azure Managed Redis is built on Redis Enterprise software, offering significant improvements: Enterprise-grade features: Active geo-replication, Redis modules, and more Performance & Cost: More performant and cost-effective than all tiers of Azure Cache for Redis Reliability: Zone redundancy by default, up to 99.999% availability with geo-replication Simplified Management: Native Azure experience, no Marketplace component, easier provisioning and billing compared to Azure Cache for Redis Enterprise Migration Guidance: What Customers Need to Do Upgrade Early Microsoft recommends upgrading to Azure Managed Redis as soon as possible, rather than waiting for the retirement deadline. Early migration ensures you benefit from new features and avoid last-minute disruptions. Migration Tooling For Basic/Standard/Premium: A command-line migration experience will be available in phases from November 2025, starting with the Basic caches support in preview. This tooling will allow you to migrate your cache endpoint, using the same hostname and access key for a seamless transition. For Enterprise/EnterpriseFlash: Migration tooling will roll out in phases starting March 2026. Downtime: If you use the migration tooling, expect only a brief connection blip (a few seconds) when the DNS record is updated. This is similar to the downtime experienced during regular maintenance. Application Changes Update your Redis hostname and access key to point to the new Azure Managed Redis instance. Azure Managed Redis is clustered by default. Most client libraries (e.g., StackExchange.Redis) work out-of-the-box, but check your library’s documentation for cluster support. Non-clustered support is available up to 25GB, but clustering is recommended for performance and scalability. For migrating data, see various options outlined in this blogpost: Data Migration with RIOT-X for Azure Managed Redis | Microsoft Community Hub and here. Reservations You can cancel or exchange your existing reservations for Azure Cache for Redis as described in Microsoft Cost Management documentation. Feature Parity and Regional Availability: What’s Coming and When Azure Managed Redis is actively being enhanced to close feature gaps and expand regional coverage. Here are the key ETAs for upcoming features and regions (all dates are tentative): Azure Public Regions France Central: November 2025 Qatar Central: December 2026 Azure Sovereign Clouds China Cloud: February 2026 US Gov Cloud: February 2026 Larger SKUs Memory Optimized, Balanced, Compute Optimized (up to 500GB): March 2026 Flash Optimized (up to 1000GB): March 2026 Management Operations Scheduling maintenance windows: February 2026 Keyspace notifications: March 2026 If you need a feature or region that isn’t yet available, reach out to support or email AzureManagedRedis@microsoft.com for guidance. Resources for a Smooth Migration Migration Overview & Guidance Choosing the Right Tier Azure Managed Redis architecture Key Takeaways for Customers Don’t wait—start planning your migration to Azure Managed Redis now. Migration tooling will make the process easier, with phased rollouts starting November 2025. Feature parity is a priority, with major gaps closing by March–June 2026. Reach out to Microsoft support if you have blockers or need help with migration.Orchestrate multi-LLM workflows with Azure Managed Redis
Authors: Roberto Perez, George von Bülow & Roy de Milde Key challenge for building effective LLMs In the age of generative AI, large language models (LLMs) are reshaping how we build applications — from chatbots to intelligent agents and beyond. But as these systems become more dynamic and multi-modal, one key challenge stands out: how do we route requests efficiently to the right model, prompt, or action at the right time? Traditional architectures struggle with the speed and precision required to orchestrate LLM calls in real-time, especially at scale. This is where Azure Managed Redis steps in — acting as a fast, in-memory data layer to power smart, context-aware routing for LLMs. In this blog, we explore how Redis and Azure are enabling developers to build AI systems that respond faster, think smarter, and scale effortlessly. Across industries, customers are hitting real limitations. AI workloads often need to track context across multiple interactions, store intermediate decisions, and switch between different prompts or models based on user intent — all while staying responsive. But stitching this logic together using traditional databases or microservice queues introduces latency, complexity, and cost. Teams face challenges like keeping routing logic fast and adaptive, storing transient LLM state without bloating backend services, and coordinating agent-like behaviors across multiple components. These are exactly the pain points AMR was built to address — giving developers a low-latency, highly available foundation for real-time AI orchestration and more. How to use Azure Managed Redis as a Semantic Router Semantic routing uses AI to route user queries to the right service, model or endpoint, based on their intent and context. Unlike rule-based systems, it leverages Generative AI to understand the meaning behind requests, enabling more accurate and efficient decisions. Importantly, the semantic router itself does not forward the query—it only selects the appropriate route. Your application is responsible for taking that routing decision and sending the query to the correct agent, model, or human. The users sends a query, which is passed to the system for processing The query is analyzed by an embedding model to understand its semantic intent and context The semantic router evaluates the user’s intent and context to choose the optimal route: A specific model for further processing An agent to handle the query A default response if applicable Escalation to a human for manual handling, if needed Valid queries go through the RAG pipeline to generate a response The final response is sent back to the user Code examples + Architecture Example: Jupyter Notebook with Semantic Router Let’s look at a Jupyter Notebook example that implements a simple Semantic Router with Azure Managed Redis and the Redis Vector Library. First, we install the required Python packages and define a connection to an AMR instance: pip install -q "redisvl>=0.6.0" sentence-transformers dotenv Define the Azure Managed Redis Connection. import os import warnings warnings.filterwarnings("ignore") from dotenv import load_dotenv load_dotenv() REDIS_HOST = os.getenv("REDIS_HOST") # ex: "gvb-sm.uksouth.redis.azure.net" REDIS_PORT = os.getenv("REDIS_PORT") # for AMR this is always 10000 REDIS_PASSWORD = os.getenv("REDIS_PASSWORD") # ex: "giMzOzIP4YmjNBGCfmqpgA7e749d6GyIHAzCaF5XXXXX" # If SSL is enabled on the endpoint, use rediss:// as the URL prefix REDIS_URL = f"redis://:{REDIS_PASSWORD}@{REDIS_HOST}:{REDIS_PORT}" Next, we create our first Semantic Router with an allow/block list: from redisvl.extensions.router import Route, SemanticRouter from redisvl.utils.vectorize import HFTextVectorizer vectorizer = HFTextVectorizer() # Semantic router blocked_references = [ "things about aliens", "corporate questions about agile", "anything about the S&P 500", ] blocked_route = Route(name="block_list", references=blocked_references) block_router = SemanticRouter( name="bouncer", vectorizer=vectorizer, routes=[blocked_route], redis_url=REDIS_URL, overwrite=False, ) To prevent users from asking certain categories of questions, we can define example references in a list of blocked routes using the Redis Vector Library function SemanticRouter(). While it is also possible to implement blocking at the LLM level through prompt engineering (e.g., instructing the model to refuse answering certain queries), this approach still requires an LLM call, adding unnecessary cost and latency. By handling blocking earlier with semantic routing in Azure Managed Redis, unwanted queries can be intercepted before ever reaching the model, saving LLM tokens, reducing expenses, and improving overall efficiency. Let’s try it out: user_query = "Why is agile so important?" route_match = block_router(user_query) route_match The router first vectorizes the user query using the specified Hugging Face text vectorizer. It finds a semantic similarity with route reference “corporate question sabout agile” and returns the matching route ‘block_list`. Note the returned distance value – this indicates the degree of semantic similarity between the user query and the blocked reference. You can fine-tune the Semantic Router by specifying a minimum threshold value that must be reached to count as a match. For full details and more complex examples, you can explore the Jupyter Notebooks in this GitHub repository. How do customers benefit? For customers, this technology delivers clear and immediate value. By using Azure Managed Redis as the high-performance backbone for semantic routing and agent coordination, organizations can significantly reduce latency, simplify infrastructure, and accelerate time-to-value for AI-driven experiences. Instead of building custom logic spread across multiple services, teams get a centralized, scalable, and fully managed in-memory layer that handles vector search, routing logic, and real-time state management — all with enterprise-grade SLAs, security, and Azure-native integration. The result? Smarter and faster LLM interactions, reduced operational complexity, and the flexibility to scale AI use cases from prototypes to production without re-architecting. Whether you're building an intelligent chatbot, orchestrating multi-agent workflows, or powering internal copilots, this Redis-backed technology gives you the agility to adapt in real time. You can dynamically route based on user intent, past interactions, or even business rules — all while maintaining low-latency responses that users expect from modern AI applications. And because it’s fully managed on Azure, teams can focus on innovation rather than infrastructure, with built-in support for high availability, monitoring, and enterprise governance. It’s a future-proof foundation for AI systems that need to be not just powerful, but precise. Try Azure Managed Redis today If you want to explore how to route large language models efficiently, Azure Managed Redis provides a reliable and low-latency solution. You can learn more about the service on the Azure Managed Redis page and find detailed documentation in the Azure Redis overview. For hands-on experience, check out the routing optimization notebook and other examples in the Redis AI resources repository and GitHub - loriotpiroloriol/amr-semantic-router. Give it a try to see how it fits your LLM routing needs.Building faster AI agents with Azure Managed Redis and .NET Aspire
AI is evolving fast—and so are the tools to build intelligent, responsive applications. In our recent Microsoft Reactor session, Catherine Wang (Principal Product Manager at Microsoft) and Roberto Perez (Microsoft MVP and Senior Global Solutions Architect at Redis) shared how Azure Managed Redis helps you create Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) AI agents with exceptional speed and consistency. Why RAG agents? RAG applications combine the power of large language models (LLMs) with your own data to answer questions accurately. For example, a customer support chatbot can deliver precise, pre-approved answers instead of inventing them on the fly. This ensures consistency, reduces risk, and improves customer experience. Where Azure Managed Redis fits with agentic scenarios In this project, Azure Managed Redis is used as a high-performance, in-memory vector database to support Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), enabling fast similarity searches over embeddings to retrieve and ground the LLM with the most relevant known answers. Beyond this, Azure Managed Redis is a versatile platform that supports a range of AI-native use cases, including: Semantic Cache – Cache and reuse previous LLM responses based on semantic similarity to reduce latency and improve reliability. LLM Memory – Persist recent interactions and context to maintain coherent, multi-turn conversations. Agentic Memory – Store long-term agent knowledge, actions, and plans to enable more intelligent and autonomous behavior over time. Feature Store – Serve real-time features to machine learning models during inference for personalization and decision-making. These capabilities make Azure Managed Redis a foundational building block for building fast, stateful, and intelligent AI applications. Demo highlights In the session, the team demonstrates how to: Deploy a RAG AI agent using .NET Aspire and Azure Container Apps. Secure your Redis instance with Azure Entra ID, removing the need for connection strings. Use Semantic Kernel to orchestrate agents and retrieve knowledge base content via vector search. Monitor and debug microservices with built-in observability tools. Finally, we walk through code examples in C# and Python, demonstrating how you can integrate Redis search, vector similarity, and prompt orchestration into your own apps. Get Started Ready to explore? ✅ Watch the full session replay: Building a RAG AI Agent Using Azure Redis ✅ Try the sample code: Azure Managed Redis RAG AI SampleGet started with Azure Managed Redis today: a step-by-step guide to deployment
At Microsoft Build 2025, we announced the general availability of Azure Managed Redis, a fully-managed, first-party service built in partnership with Redis. Ready for production workloads globally, Azure Managed Redis marks a major milestone for developers looking to build high-performance, real-time applications with the speed and reliability of Redis, fully managed on Azure. Call to action: get started with Azure Managed Redis in the Azure Portal. Key updates: Up to 15x performance improvements over Azure Cache for Redis 99.999% availability with multi-region Active‑Active replication Support for Redis 7.4 (with Redis 8 coming soon) New modules including RedisJSON, vector search, bloom filters, and time-series Flexible SKUs that let you scale memory and compute independently Navigate the new Azure Managed Redis in the Azure Portal Azure Managed Redis also comes with an updated Azure Portal experience which simplifies how you create, configure, and manage your Redis instances. Whether experimenting or deploying to production, the portal gives you full control with a few clicks. Step-by-step guide to deploying in the Azure Portal Want to see Azure Managed Redis in action? This quick walkthrough video shows how to set up Azure Managed Redis inside the Azure Portal: 👉 Watch on YouTube In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to: How to configure your Active-Active instance for high availability and low latency Setting up geo-replication across regions for 99.999% availability SLA Key tips and best practices to get started quickly No code required — just the Azure Portal and a few minutes of your time! Azure Managed Redis is perfect for cloud architects, developers, and IT pros looking to build resilient, globally available Redis-backed applications on Azure. Whether you're building AI-powered applications, speeding up your web services, or just getting started with Redis, now’s the time to explore what Azure Managed Redis can do. To learn more, head to our product page for more information or contact your Microsoft sales representative. To get started, provision Azure Managed Redis in the Azure Portal today. Resources Azure Managed Redis product page Azure Managed Redis pricing page Create an Azure Managed Redis instance Watch the Microsoft Build 2025 session on AMR Explore the documentation
