Aerospike vs Memcached: What are the differences?

Introduction

This Markdown code provides a comparison between Aerospike and Memcached, highlighting their key differences.

1. Data Model: Aerospike supports complex data types such as lists, maps, and hyperloglogs, in addition to simple data types like strings and integers. Memcached, on the other hand, only supports key-value pairs of simple data types.

2. Scalability: Aerospike is designed to scale both vertically and horizontally, allowing for increasing the capacity and performance by adding more nodes or increasing the memory and CPU of existing nodes. In contrast, Memcached lacks built-in horizontal scaling capabilities and typically requires sharding or additional layers to achieve high scalability.

3. Persistence: Aerospike is a hybrid database that can be configured to store data in-memory, on solid-state drives (SSDs), or a combination of both. It provides durability and persistence by automatically syncing data to disk. Memcached, being an in-memory caching system, doesn't inherently offer persistence. Data stored in Memcached is lost upon system restart or failure, relying on client applications to manage data recovery.

4. Clustering: Aerospike deploys a shared-nothing clustering architecture, where each node in the cluster operates independently and shares data through a replication mechanism. This enables high availability, fault tolerance, and continuous availability even during node failures. Memcached, however, relies on manual distribution and replication of data across multiple cache instances, making it less fault-tolerant.

5. Operations: Aerospike provides a rich set of data manipulation operations beyond basic key-value storage, including secondary indexes, batch and complex operations, and user-defined functions. Memcached primarily provides basic get, set, and delete operations on key-value pairs.

6. Consistency and Replication: Aerospike supports different levels of consistency, allowing users to select their desired consistency model based on data availability and performance requirements. It also offers flexible replication options, including cross-datacenter replication. Conversely, Memcached doesn't provide built-in replication or consistency mechanisms, making it a simple caching system without data synchronization between nodes.

In summary, Aerospike offers advanced data modeling, scalability, persistence, clustering, operations, and customizable consistency, while Memcached focuses on simple key-value caching, lacks inherent persistence, and has limited scalability options.