Inside Azure Managed Redis: A guide to Azure’s two Redis services

Developers exploring the Azure portal often notice two Redis services: Azure Cache for Redis and Azure Managed Redis. At first, it can be confusing: why are there two services that seem to solve the same problem? This post kicks off the “Inside Azure Managed Redis” series by explaining how these offerings came to be, what sets them apart, and why Azure Managed Redis exists as the next-generation service.

Azure Cache for Redis was the original service, introduced more than a decade ago. It offers plans like Basic, Standard, Premium, and Enterprise, each with a distinct feature set. The challenge was that these plans were not just pricing tiers—they were built on different cores. Basic, Standard, and Premium used Redis Open Source, while Enterprise and Enterprise Flash used Redis Software. Because of this split, developers who started small often faced painful code and data migrations and new behaviors when upgrading to higher tiers. The Enterprise plan also had steep costs and large minimum sizes, making it a poor fit for dev and test workloads.

Azure Managed Redis was designed to remove that friction. All tiers are built on Redis Enterprise software, so the developer experience stays consistent from day one. Instead of feature-gated plans, it offers performance tiers—memory optimized, compute optimized, balanced, and flash optimized. Developers can start small, scale as workloads grow, or switch tiers without migration. This flexibility makes it both cost-effective and production-ready.

Behind the scenes, Redis Software has been tuned specifically for Azure infrastructure, ensuring shard configurations that deliver the best performance-to-cost ratio. The result is a modern, scalable service that fixes the limitations of the previous service. With newer Redis versions, Azure Managed Redis has become a crucial component for AI use cases, offering key building blocks for functionalities such as vector search, semantic caching and routing, and agent memory management.

If you’re starting fresh on Azure, check out Azure Managed Redis—it’s the simplest way to get a consistent, enterprise-grade Redis experience that grows with your workload.