This week, Amazon Web Services introduced what’s being dubbed “Amazon ElastiCache,” a new web service that – according to the online retail giant – makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache for web applications running in the AWS cloud.
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 says that its ElastiCache is compliant with Memcached, a popular and widely used memory object caching system. Consequently, code, applications, and tools that developers use today with their existing Memcached environments will work well with the service.
“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,” says Raju Gulabani, Vice President of Database Services, Amazon Web Services. “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.”
“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,” adds Jon Brendsel, Vice President of Product Development at PBS. “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.”
For more info on Amazon’s latest unveiling, click here.
