Programmatically use distributed caching in SharePoint 2013?

Question

As per below TechNet article, developers are not allowed to use the AppFabric instance that comes with SharePoint 2013. The expectation is to deploy a seperate AppFabric cluster for custom applications.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219572.aspx#Important
Distributed caching was a long waited, nice SharePoint feature but it does not make sense to restrict developer access to this. We have a requirement to cache fairly smaller amount of data (must be distributed), but cannot deploy a separate Cache servers
for this. What are my options (other than System.Web.Caching)? Is there an API to safely cache smaller amount of data? What is the rationale behind restricting access to default AppFabric instance come with SharePoint?
Thanks in Advance,
Amal

Answer 1

Yes, it's just a thread-safe implementation of object cache and not a distributed cache. Probably the reason behind recommending to use a separate AppFabric cache cluster is that additional named caches of custom solutions and applications will
interfere with SharePoint  named caches. Without a scope and priority defined, the named caches of custom solutions may start evicting SharePoint items if their usage is much higher than that of SharePoint ones.
AppFabric Caching and SharePoint: Concepts and Examples (Part
1)
This post is my own opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinion or view of Slalom.