ElastiCache
ElastiCache Simplified:
The ElastiCache service makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud. It helps you boost the performance of your existing databases by retrieving data from high throughput and low latency in-memory data stores.
ElastiCache Key Details:
The service is great for improving the performance of web applications by allowing you to receive information locally instead of relying solely on relatively distant DBs.
Amazon ElastiCache offers fully managed Redis and Memcached for the most demanding applications that require sub-millisecond response times.
For data that doesn’t change frequently and is often asked for, it makes a lot of sense to cache said data rather than querying it from the database.
Common configurations that improve DB performance include introducing read replicas of a DB primary and inserting a caching layer into the storage architecture.
MemcacheD is for simple caching purposes with horizontal scaling and multi-threaded performance, but if you require more complexity for your caching environment then choose Redis.
A further comparison between MemcacheD and Redis for ElastiCache:
Another advantage of using ElastiCache is that by caching query results, you pay the price of the DB query only once without having to re-execute the query unless the data changes.
Amazon ElastiCache can scale-out, scale-in, and scale-up to meet fluctuating application demands. Write and memory scaling is supported with sharding. Replicas provide read scaling.