Announcing Amazon ElastiCache

Posted on: Aug 22, 2011

We are excited to announce the public beta launch of Amazon ElastiCache, a new web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud. The service improves the performance of web applications by allowing you to retrieve information from a fast, managed, in-memory caching system, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases. Amazon ElastiCache is protocol-compliant with Memcached, a widely adopted memory object caching system, so code, applications, and tools that you use today with your existing Memcached environments will work seamlessly with the service. Amazon ElastiCache simplifies and offloads the management, monitoring, and operation of in-memory cache environments, enabling you to focus on the differentiating parts of your applications. The service is ideal for many read-heavy application workloads (such as social networking, gaming, media sharing and Q&A portals) or compute-intensive workloads (such as a recommendation engine).

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. You can visit the Amazon ElastiCache page to learn more about the benefits of the service. You can easily get started by viewing a quick demo or reviewing the Getting Started Guide, and launch a pre-configured Cache Cluster in minutes.