Amazon to manage your cache

Amazon ElastiCache is a managed caching service, which means all managing, monitoring and operating of an in-memory cache environment is taken out of the customer’s hands.

“Until today, businesses have had little choice but to shoulder this responsibility themselves,” explained Raju Gulabani, VP of database services at AWS.

Launched in beta a couple of weeks ago, the ElastiCache is easy to migrate to from existing Memcached environments as it is fully compliant with the Memcached memory object caching system.

Customers using ElastiCache experience a managed, flexible and resilient caching service that quickly and easily adds in-memory cache to application architectures – something customers have been calling for, according to Gulabani.

“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," he said.

The cloud will benefit hugely from ElastiCache, says Clive Longbottom, an analyst at Quocirca, where everything takes place in a single cloud hoster’s datacentre.

Caching apparently gets rid of latencies within the cloud host – which, tops security as a big problem for up above.

Resulting issues, however, include loss of all data in memory if power fails, and it cannot be used across datacentres as interconnects have to be ‘superfast’ from cache to compute environment.

Launching the Cache Clusters and sending forth the Cache Nodes, according to AWS is going to please many customers. Longbottom says the ElastiCache is not so great for “anything where composite applications, shared applications or distributed data is concerned".

Touted as best for read-heavy application workloads such as social networking, gaming and media sharing - AWS knows its market.