REDIS (Azure) and ColdFusion 2018 Enterprise

Wait, let's not mix things up. What Tribule was referring to initially and until his last comment was CF's ability to use Redis as an alternative session store. The only choices are that or the default of storing them in CF's heap (not even in ehcache).

The "alternative caching" you refer to now BKBK (and in tribule's very last sentence of his previous comment) is instead about the change in CF2018 to allow "alternative caching engines". That's quite different.

As background for some who may come upon this thread, from CF9 until then, the only caching engine was ehcache. Now in CF2018 Standard one can switch to JCS (Java's caching engine), while in CF2018 Enterprise one can switch among those or memcached or redis.

So BKBK, when you say you have been looking for anyone who has used REDIS as "the main caching engine" for CF, let's just be clear that while you may not have been able to find "anyone" using that, just know that the ONLY people who COULD do it would be a small percent of the CF population: those who are a) running CF2018, b) running Enterprise, c) use CF's caching features, d) knew that CF2018 let you change the caching engine, e) chose to change it, and f) chose redis (vs memcached or jcs). And then g) they'd have to be people who had reason to somehow discuss publicly their use of it. That may well be a very small population. :-) But it doesn't mean they've had a problem with it, of course.

Still, I realize you may prefer (or simply hope) to see more word of people using it. That will come in time.

Another challenge is that implementing Redis on Windows is challenging, and lots of CF shops really do use Windows--yep, even large scale enterprises.

But that's where alternatives like Azure's Redis service (as Tribule mentioned) or others will help ease the transition. Of course, then it's an outside resource, with network latency, and its managed elsewhere (so one has to learn how to monitor and twiddle its knobs). I have more hope that Windows shops might instead leverage a Docker container running Redis (in Linux) just to make it easier.

If you are a Windows shop and might be intrigued about leveraging redis, either for sessions or for caching, and you've tripped over implementing redis, do consider using a docker container of it instead. I'll be curious to hear if folks try that, especially those who either test or just run a large load against it.

And of course, like you both, I would look forward to hearing more from ANYONE using redis (in any implementation) for those. But let's do keep distinct the original question (using it for CF sessions--where it's the only alternative and is in CF 2016 and 2018 Std and Enterprise) vs this later discussion (using it for CF caching in CF2018, where it's one of 4 alternatives, but along with memcached it's in CF2018 Enterprise only) .

HTH.