The problem Microsoft can't solve alone
Microsoft is deprecating Azure Cache for Redis (ACR), its open-source Redis offering on Azure. The retirement is rolling out in phases: instance creation begins shutting down in April 2026, Enterprise tiers are fully retired by March 2027, and Basic/Standard/Premium tiers follow by September 2028. All remaining ACR deployments will be permanently deleted — including the data they hold.
The replacement is Azure Managed Redis (AMR), a licensed product built in partnership with Redis. AMR offers better performance, active-active replication, and long-term support — but getting there is the hard part.
Why migration is so difficult
Traditional Redis migration approaches fail at enterprise scale for three reasons:
Downtime is unacceptable
Financial services, healthcare, and e-commerce organizations running Redis as a session store, cache layer, or real-time data pipeline cannot tolerate migration windows. Even planned maintenance creates business risk.
Manual migration is slow and expensive
Professional services for manual Redis migrations can cost tens of thousands of dollars per database. For an enterprise running dozens or hundreds of cache instances, this approach doesn’t scale — financially or operationally. A typical enterprise migration takes months with a dedicated team.
Rollback is manual or nonexistent
If something goes wrong mid-migration, most approaches leave you in an inconsistent state. Teams spend as much time planning rollback procedures as they do planning the migration itself.
Compounding the challenge: several popular Azure regions are approaching capacity for AMR provisioning, creating significant delays for even willing customers. Extension requests are not guaranteed to be approved.
How Eden solves this
Eden's migration product, Exodus, is a wire-protocol proxy built in Rust that sits transparently between your application and your Redis deployment. It requires zero code changes — your application connects to Eden the same way it connects to Redis today.
1. Point your traffic through Eden
Eden intercepts your application’s Redis traffic at the wire protocol level using IP tables or a DNS/endpoint swap. Your application doesn’t know Eden exists — it sees a standard Redis connection with approximately 20 microseconds of added latency.
2. Analyze before you migrate
Eden’s analysis phase scans your current ACR deployment and produces a full compatibility report: SKU sizing recommendations, clustering configuration mapping, feature gap detection (ACLs, keyspace notifications), and a cost projection for your AMR target.
3. Migrate with zero downtime
Eden supports multiple migration strategies including Blue/Green, Canary, and scan-based approaches. The preferred method uses scan-based replication with immediate dual writes — every write that hits your source database is simultaneously written to your AMR target from the moment migration begins. No data is lost. No writes are dropped.
4. Validate in production before you cut over
Eden’s TCP traffic splitter copies your live production traffic to the new AMR instance, allowing you to run real workloads against the target and verify behavior before switching. Smoke tests run automatically. If anything fails, Eden’s circuit breaker rolls back instantly.
5. Cut over in seconds
When validation passes, Eden redirects traffic to AMR. If issues arise post-cutover, rollback is a single API call — Eden switches back to your source with no data loss.
Enterprise edge cases Eden handles out of the box
The biggest blockers in ACR-to-AMR migrations aren't the data move itself — they're the configuration mismatches and environmental differences that surface mid-flight. Eden's compatibility phase catches these before migration begins.
Clustering configuration mapping
ACR Premium customers using open-source clustering often have custom configurations that don’t map cleanly to AMR. Eden detects your current clustering mode and client library, determines whether it’s cluster-aware, and produces the correct AMR clustering configuration automatically — eliminating the most common source of failed migrations.
Missing feature detection
Some features available in ACR are not yet supported in AMR, including ACLs and keyspace notifications. Eden’s compatibility scan identifies every feature your application depends on, flags gaps against the target AMR version, and warns you before migration begins — so you’re never surprised by broken functionality post-cutover.
Private endpoint and networking
Enterprise deployments typically run inside private VNets with private endpoints. Migrating to AMR requires provisioning new private endpoints and updating network configurations. Eden maps your existing networking setup and guides the configuration for your target environment, including handling edge cases around private firewall rules and storage account access for persistence snapshots.
SKU right-sizing
Many ACR customers are significantly over-provisioned due to the rigid tier structure of the legacy service. Eden’s analysis phase measures actual usage patterns and recommends optimized AMR SKUs — often resulting in meaningful infrastructure cost savings that help offset the migration investment.
ACL and configuration preservation
Eden exports your existing ACL rules, database configuration, and clustering state into portable formats before migration. If features aren’t yet available in AMR, your configuration is preserved and ready to apply when support is added — nothing is lost in the transition.
Performance at scale
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Throughput | 500,000 ops/sec on 4 vCPU |
| Added latency | ~20 microseconds |
| ACR version support | All versions |
| AMR version support | All versions |
The ecosystem behind it
Eden isn't operating alone. This migration is backed by a coordinated partnership:
Microsoft
Eden is available on the Azure Marketplace, enabling seamless procurement through existing Microsoft spending commitments. Microsoft and Eden are working together to help customers transition to AMR.
Redis
Redis has validated Eden’s migration approach through independent technical evaluation and is partnering with Eden to help customers move to AMR successfully.
Datadog
Eden’s native observability partner for migrations. Eden deployments can include built-in Datadog monitoring — infrastructure metrics, traces, and logs out of the box. Datadog provides first-party Azure Managed Redis visibility for teams already standardizing on Datadog.
This means when you engage Eden, you get migration tooling, observability, and vendor support in a single engagement — not three separate procurement cycles.
What you keep after migration
Exodus isn't a throwaway tool. After your migration completes, Eden continues to provide value:
- Unified observability across your Redis, Postgres, MongoDB, and other data infrastructure through a single pane of glass
- Governance and access controls with a unified RBAC model spanning every connected system
- AI-powered infrastructure querying that lets your team ask natural language questions against live production systems using your existing authentication and permissions
Migration is the entry point. The platform is the long-term value.
Timeline and engagement model
A typical enterprise ACR-to-AMR migration with Eden follows this timeline:
| Phase | Duration | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Analysis | 1–2 days | Eden scans your ACR deployment, produces compatibility report and cost projection |
| Configuration | 1–2 days | Target AMR provisioning, clustering config mapping, Datadog setup |
| Migration | Hours to 1 day | Live migration with dual writes, traffic validation, automated smoke tests |
| Validation | 1–3 days | Production traffic shadowing on AMR, performance comparison |
| Cutover | Minutes | Traffic redirect with instant rollback capability |
Total: 1–2 weeks from kickoff to production cutover — compared to 1–3 months with manual approaches.
Pricing
Eden licenses are structured as a one-year enterprise agreement based on your current ACR deployment scope. Pricing includes the full migration, 12 months of platform access, and built-in Datadog observability.
Cost savings: Many customers find that migrating from ACR to AMR results in significant infrastructure cost savings — often more than covering Eden's migration fee while freeing budget for other infrastructure investments.
Eden is available on the Azure Marketplace, enabling procurement through your existing Microsoft spending commitments.
How Eden compares
| Aspect | Manual / Redis PS | Eden |
|---|---|---|
| Downtime | Required | None |
| App changes | Usually required | None |
| Timeline | 1–3 months | 1–2 weeks |
| Cost per database | Tens of thousands (manual) | Included in license |
| Rollback | Manual / restore from backup | Instant (single API call) |
| Observability | Minimal | Full end-to-end (Datadog) |
| Post-migration value | None | Unified platform |
Your ACR deprecation clock is running
Every month of delay increases migration risk as Azure capacity constraints tighten. Enterprise tiers retire March 2027, Basic/Standard/Premium tiers retire September 2028. Some popular Azure regions are already experiencing significant AMR provisioning delays.