Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the release of Amazon ElastiCache, a new Web service for running an in-memory cache for apps on the AWS cloud.
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.
"Amazon ElastiCache will make it very easy for PBS to deploy and
manage our distributed Memcached environment. We can have multi-node
cache environments configured, up and running in minutes," said Jon
Brendsel, vice president of product development at PBS, in a statement.
"Amazon ElastiCache also takes care of ongoing administrative functions
including failure recovery and patching, allowing us to focus more on
delivering great Web experiences to our viewers."
In addition, TicketLeap, a
self-service online ticketing and event marketing platform, has
benefited from the scalability of AWS. "We sell tickets for a number of
extremely popular events across the world, so our application demands
get very spikey," said Keith Fitzgerald, vice president of engineering
at TicketLeap, in a statement. "Amazon ElastiCache provides us the
ability to deploy and scale out distributed Cache Clusters in minutes.
Moving forward, we intend to use the service to rapidly increase or
decrease our cache footprint to meet our application demand. The
detailed monitoring capabilities will help us quickly diagnose and fix
throughput or latency issues."
Amazon ElastiCache, in conjunction with application servers in
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and database servers in
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), provides customers
with an integrated platform to run fully managed application stacks in
the cloud. Like all AWS services, Amazon ElastiCache is available on
demand and users pay only for the resources used. Pricing for Amazon
ElastiCache is based on the size of the Cache Nodes used and begins as
low as $0.095 per hour. The service is currently available in the US
East (Virginia) Region, and will be available in other AWS Regions in
the coming months.
Enterprises and developers can get started with Amazon ElastiCache by visiting www.aws.amazon.com/elasticache.
Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.
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