Posted On: Nov 29, 2012

We are excited to announce the availability of Auto Discovery, a new way to connect to your Amazon ElastiCache cluster. Auto Discovery enables automatic discovery of cache nodes by clients when the nodes are added to or removed from an ElastiCache cluster.

Developers today must keep track of the node endpoints of their ElastiCache clusters. Also, they must update the list of endpoints manually to handle cluster membership changes. Depending on how the client application is architected, this might require shutting down the application and restarting it, thereby resulting in downtime. With Auto Discovery, we are eliminating this complexity. You only need to know a single cluster configuration endpoint that is valid throughout the life of your ElastiCache cluster and never changes as you modify your cluster.

As before, Amazon ElastiCache remains protocol-compliant with Memcached, a widely adopted memory object caching system, so code, applications, and popular tools that you use today with existing Memcached environments will continue to work seamlessly with Auto Discovery.

To get started you will need the Amazon ElastiCache Cluster Client which will serve as your Memcached compatible client with Auto Discovery capability. At this time we support Java. We will be providing PHP and other language support in the near future. If you would like to enhance your existing Memcached client with Auto Discovery capability please see the protocol documentation.

For more information about Auto Discovery, please see Jeff Barr’s blog post.