Cloud Computing: Google App Engine Caching Catches Up With Amazon
July 18, 2013
Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.
Google App Engine gained ground as a developer platform Wednesday when Google added a dedicated, as opposed to shared, caching service that can significantly speed up many applications. The move puts App Engine on a more equal footing with Microsoft’s Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services, which launched its ElastiCache service in August 2011. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings Heroku and Engine Yard also offer caching services.
The App Engine service is based on open source Memcached (pronounced "mem-cache d"), a caching system that automatically saves frequently used data to cache and, when necessary, pushes out aging data as it falls into disuse. It was created by Brad Fitzpatrick in 2003 to support the operation of the interactive consumer site LiveJournal. It was later rewritten in C and became a popular open source code module…
Caching systems are frequently used with transaction processing and high-activity Web applications. They store data as objects in server memory or add on solid state modules, retrieving data at high rates of speed without going to a disk-based data store. Facebook, Zynga, You Tube, Twitter and Reddit are all examples of applications that rely on Memcached…
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