Amazon ElastiCache logo

Amazon ElastiCache

Deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud

What is Amazon ElastiCache?

ElastiCache 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 Memcached and Redis.
Amazon ElastiCache is a tool in the Managed Memcache category of a tech stack.

Who uses Amazon ElastiCache?

Companies
600 companies reportedly use Amazon ElastiCache in their tech stacks, including Airbnb, Amazon, and LaunchDarkly.

Developers
668 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Amazon ElastiCache.

Amazon ElastiCache Integrations

SignalFx, Cloudcraft, Centreon, Eucalyptus, and Hosted Graphite are some of the popular tools that integrate with Amazon ElastiCache. Here's a list of all 7 tools that integrate with Amazon ElastiCache.
Pros of Amazon ElastiCache
58
Redis
32
High-performance
26
Backed by amazon
21
Memcached
14
Elastic
Decisions about Amazon ElastiCache

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Amazon ElastiCache in their tech stack.

Simon Bettison
Managing Director at Bettison.org Limited · | 8 upvotes · 745.9K views
Shared insights
at

In 2012 we made the very difficult decision to entirely re-engineer our existing monolithic LAMP application from the ground up in order to address some growing concerns about it's long term viability as a platform.

Full application re-write is almost always never the answer, because of the risks involved. However the situation warranted drastic action as it was clear that the existing product was going to face severe scaling issues. We felt it better address these sooner rather than later and also take the opportunity to improve the international architecture and also to refactor the database in. order that it better matched the changes in core functionality.

PostgreSQL was chosen for its reputation as being solid ACID compliant database backend, it was available as an offering AWS RDS service which reduced the management overhead of us having to configure it ourselves. In order to reduce read load on the primary database we implemented an Elasticsearch layer for fast and scalable search operations. Synchronisation of these indexes was to be achieved through the use of Sidekiq's Redis based background workers on Amazon ElastiCache. Again the AWS solution here looked to be an easy way to keep our involvement in managing this part of the platform at a minimum. Allowing us to focus on our core business.

Rails ls was chosen for its ability to quickly get core functionality up and running, its MVC architecture and also its focus on Test Driven Development using RSpec and Selenium with Travis CI providing continual integration. We also liked Ruby for its terse, clean and elegant syntax. Though YMMV on that one!

Unicorn was chosen for its continual deployment and reputation as a reliable application server, nginx for its reputation as a fast and stable reverse-proxy. We also took advantage of the Amazon CloudFront CDN here to further improve performance by caching static assets globally.

We tried to strike a balance between having control over management and configuration of our core application with the convenience of being able to leverage AWS hosted services for ancillary functions (Amazon SES , Amazon SQS Amazon Route 53 all hosted securely inside Amazon VPC of course!).

Whilst there is some compromise here with potential vendor lock in, the tasks being performed by these ancillary services are no particularly specialised which should mitigate this risk. Furthermore we have already containerised the stack in our development using Docker environment, and looking to how best to bring this into production - potentially using Amazon EC2 Container Service

See more
Pedro Arnal Puente
CTO at La Cupula Music SL · | 8 upvotes · 625.6K views
Shared insights
at

Our base infrastructure is composed of Debian based servers running in Amazon EC2 , asset storage with Amazon S3 , and Amazon RDS for Aurora and Redis under Amazon ElastiCache for data storage.

We are starting to work in automated provisioning and management with Terraform.

See more

Blog Posts

Amazon ElastiCache's Features

  • Support for two engines: Memcached and Redis
  • Ease of management via the AWS Management Console. With a few clicks you can configure and launch instances for the engine you wish to use.
  • Compatibility with the specific engine protocol. This means most of the client libraries will work with the respective engines they were built for - no additional changes or tweaking required.
  • Detailed monitoring statistics for the engine nodes at no extra cost via Amazon CloudWatch
  • Pay only for the resources you consume based on node hours used

Amazon ElastiCache Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Amazon ElastiCache?
Redis
Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams.
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of storing data and searching it in near real time. Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash are the Elastic Stack (sometimes called the ELK Stack).
Memcached
Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.
Azure Redis Cache
It perfectly complements Azure database services such as Cosmos DB. It provides a cost-effective solution to scale read and write throughput of your data tier. Store and share database query results, session states, static contents, and more using a common cache-aside pattern.
Amazon DynamoDB
With it , you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available distributed database cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.
See all alternatives

Amazon ElastiCache's Followers
1023 developers follow Amazon ElastiCache to keep up with related blogs and decisions.