What's the best service for managing large amounts of session data in Azure - servers are going behind a load balancer this week and we have too many options for storing session state

Redis: fast, scalable, easy to use.

@ItsNotMyFault that's my thought - but so very expensive at Azure!

@juneeighteen If you want a cheap solution you can session lock the load balancers(have the load balancer route all requests belonging to session to the same node, not sure if azures load balancers can do it though) and let each server handle its own session data (The load balancing can get a bit inefficient as long lived sessions can't be moved off a busy node but it doesn't require any additional hardware which can save some money)

If not redis, have you thought about memcache? (No idea about azure pricing though)