Amazon Web Services Launches ElastiCache Service

Amazon Web Services has announced Amazon ElastiCache, a new Web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate and scale an in-memory cache for Web applications running in the AWS cloud.

Amazon officials said the new service improves the performance of web applications by enabling customers to retrieve information from a fast, managed, in-memory caching system in the cloud, instead of relying on slower disk-based databases. Amazon ElastiCache is compliant with Memcached, a widely adopted memory object caching system, so code, applications, and tools that developers use today with their existing Memcached environments work with the service, easing the migration process.

Moreover, the service also simplifies and offloads the management, monitoring and operation of in-memory cache environments, enabling businesses to focus their engineering resources on the differentiating parts of their applications. Amazon ElastiCache is ideal for read-heavy workloads such as social networking, gaming and media sharing sites or compute intensive workloads such as recommendation engines.

“Caching is a core part of so many Web applications today, but running your own caching infrastructure is time-consuming and rarely adds differentiated value for your business,” said Raju Gulabani, vice president of Database Services at AWS, in a statement. “Until today, businesses have had little choice but to shoulder this responsibility themselves — and indeed, many AWS customers have built and managed caching solutions on top of AWS for some time. Amazon ElastiCache answers one of the most highly requested functionalities of AWS customers by providing a managed, flexible and resilient caching service in the cloud.”

AWS officials said with just a few clicks of the AWS Management Console, users can launch a Cache Cluster consisting of a collection of Cache Nodes, each running Memcached software. Customers can scale the amount of memory associated with a Cache Cluster in minutes by adding or deleting Cache Nodes to meet the demands of changing workloads. In addition, Amazon ElastiCache automatically detects and replaces failed Cache Nodes, providing a resilient system that mitigates the risk of overloaded databases, which slow website and application load times, the company said. Through integration with Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon ElastiCache provides visibility into key performance metrics associated with Cache Nodes.

To read the original eWeek article, click here: Amazon Web Services ElastiCache Launches