Today AWS has launched Amazon ElastiCache, a new service that makes it easy to add distributed in-memory caching to any application. Amazon ElastiCache handles the complexity of creating, scaling and managing an in-memory cache to free up brainpower for more differentiating activities. There are many success stories about the effectiveness of caching in many different scenarios; next to helping applications achieving fast and predictable performance, it often protects databases from requests bursts and brownouts under overload conditions. Systems that make extensive use of caching almost all report a significant reduction in the cost of their database tier. Given the widespread use of caching in many of the applications in the AWS Cloud, a caching service had been high on the request list of our customers.

Caching has become a standard component in many applications to achieve a fast and predictable performance, but maintaining a collection of cache servers in a reliable and scalable manner is not a simple task. These efforts clearly fall into the category of “operational muck”, but given the widespread usage of caching, maintenance of cache servers is no longer a differentiator and everyone will have to uptake it as the “costs of doing business”. Amazon ElastiCache takes away many of the headaches of deploying, operating and scaling the caching infrastructure. A Cache Cluster, which is a set of collaborating Cache Nodes, can be started in minutes. Scaling the total memory in the Cache Cluster is under complete control of the customers as Caching Nodes can be added and deleted on demand. Amazon Cloudwatch can be used to get detailed metrics about the performance of the Cache Nodes. Amazon ElastiCache automatically detects and replaces failed Cache Nodes to protect the cluster from those failure scenarios. Access to the Cache Cluster is controlled using Cache Security Groups giving customers full control over which application components can access which Cache Cluster.

Amazon ElastiCache is compliant with Memcached, which makes it easy for developers who are already familiar with that system to start using the service immediately. Existing applications, tools and libraries that are using a Memcached environment can simply switch over to using Amazon ElastiCache without much effort.

For more details on Amazon ElastiCache visit the detail page of the service. For more hands-on information and to get started right away, see Jeff Barr’s posting on the AWS Developer Blog. Please note that Amazon ElastiCache is currently available in the US East (Virginia) Region. It will be available in other AWS Regions in the coming months.