AWS ElastiCache
Learn about ElastiCache, an important AWS service.
ElastiCache
ElastiCache is a fully managed AWS service that provides easy, scalable, and cost-effective in-memory caching to support high-performance applications. It enables the provisioning of Redis and Memcached, two popular open-source caching engines, with just a few clicks.
Just as RDS is a service to get managed databases (like MySQL and Oracle), ElastiCache is a service to get managed caches.
Note: Redis and Memcached are in-memory databases that provide low latency and very high performance.
Points to note:
- Adding ElastiCache in front of the RDS database will require a lot of code changes in an application. However, existing applications that use Redis or Memcached can use ElastiCache with minimal modification.
- ElastiCache is a managed service. OS patching, maintenance, backups, and failovers are all managed by AWS.
- It can be used for storing session state.
- It doesn’t support IAM authentication. IAM ElastiCache policies will control access to ElastiCache via console, API, or CLI but will not allow applications to authenticate.
Use cases:
- When fetching data from the database is slow and expensive.
- When data is mostly