Amazon ElastiCache

Amazon ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to set up, manage and scale distributed in-memory cache environments in the AWS Cloud.

The service improves the performance of web applications by allowing you to retrieve information from fast, managed, in-memory caches, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases. ElastiCache supports two open-source in-memory caching engines:

Memcached - a widely adopted memory object caching system. ElastiCache is protocol compliant with Memcached, so popular tools that you use today with existing Memcached environments will work seamlessly with the service. Redis – a popular open-source in-memory key-value store that supports data structures such as sorted sets and lists. ElastiCache supports Master / Slave replication and Multi-AZ which can be used to achieve cross AZ redundancy. Amazon ElastiCache automatically detects and replaces failed nodes, reducing the overhead associated with self-managed infrastructures and provides a resilient system that mitigates the risk of overloaded databases, which slow website and application load times. Through integration with Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon ElastiCache provides enhanced visibility into key performance metrics associated with your Memcached or Redis nodes.

Using Amazon ElastiCache, you can add an in-memory caching layer to your infrastructure in a matter of minutes by using the AWS Management Console.