On the second day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me… two Sitecore PaaS features: Redis Cache and Azure Search!
…and a Sitecore in a NuGet feed.
With Sitecore 8.2 Update 1, the PaaS offering shown at Symposium 2016 became available on Azure Marketplace along with ARM templates and much more.
I was interested by the introduction of Azure Search and Redis Cache. Azure Search basically renders the Lucene/SOLR discussion moot, and Azure Redis Cache brings about all kinds of capabilities for High Availability and Disaster Recovery as well as the sharing across a web farm.
Here are a few extra reads for the curious:
- Getting started with Sitecore on Azure PaaS (Johannes Zijlstra)
- Sitecore 8.2-1 on Azure Web Apps (Rob Habraken)
- How to install Sitecore 8.2u1 on Azure PaaS (Sitecore StackExchange)
- Sitecore on Azure (Sitecore Documentation)
- Sitecore gets serious about search, by leaving the game (Grant Killian)
- Azure Redis Cache – Introduction (Praveen Kumar Sreeram)
St-Cyr Thoughts 
I’m not sure “Azure Search basically renders the Lucene/SOLR discussion moot” — I think some companies might look at that bill for Azure Search and re-evaluate their search architecture 🙂
I hear ya! I guess my feeling is if you’re looking at Azure PaaS, you probably aren’t doing it because you’re looking for the budget option 🙂