Amazon Turns Memcached-Compliant
August 26, 2011
There is now a new Amazon web service called ElastiCache meant to put users closer to frequently accessed data and maybe ward off some Amazon competition.
It’s supposed to make it easy to deploy, operate and scale an in-memory cache for any web application running in Amazon’s cloud, reportedly granting Amazon customers one of their most fervent wishes, and replacing what AWS CTO Werner Vogels calls homegrown "operational muck."…
It improves the performance of web applications by retrieving data from a fast, managed, in-memory cloud caching system instead of relying on slow disk-based databases.
And it’s compliant with Memcached, the widely adopted open source memory object caching system used by Twitter, YouTube and Wikipedia so code, applications and tools that developers use with their existing Memcached environments should work seamlessly with the service, easing migration.
As one might suspect, ElastiCache is supposed to be good for read-heavy workloads such as social networking, gaming and media-sharing sites or compute-intensive workloads such as recommendation engines.
According to Vogels caching often protects databases from request bursts and brownouts under overload conditions and can cut the cost of a database tier.
Amazon says it only takes a few clicks to launch a Cache Cluster consisting of a collection of Cache Nodes, each running Memcached software. The memory associated with a Cache Cluster can be scaled by adding or deleting Cache Nodes to meet the changing workload demands.
ElastiCache also automatically detects and replaces failed Cache Nodes to mitigate the risk of overloaded databases that slow web site and application load times.
The widgetry is integrated with CloudWatch to provide visibility into key performance metrics on the Cache Nodes.
Pricing is based on the size of the Cache Nodes used and begins at 9.5 cents an hour. The service is currently available in the US East (Virginia) Region, and will be available in other AWS Regions at some point.