Simon Brunozzi is a developer with Amazon Web Services. He produced an excellent primer about Amazon’s ElastiCache service. The fast-paced demo comes with a basic and clear explanation about memory caching, Memcached and how t AWS compares.

LinkedIn, Twitter, Wikipedia and pretty much all the major Web services use Memcached. For the unfamiliar an app works like this: People hit your Web app. The Web app queries the database. The database returns the result and the user sees it in the app. As more people use the app, the developer needs to add additional Web servers and databases. The load eventually becomes too much and performance degrades.

Memory caching moves repetitive queries to a cache to limit loads on the server. The information is in the memory, as opposed to on disk, so it serves up very fast. This is why we are seeing a proliferation of in-memory options from companies such as SAP Hana.

But doing this yourself requires installing Memcached, a free open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system. It is intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. AWS is taking out the complexity by offering Memecached as a service. Amazon Elasticache is compatible with Memecached but it is managed by AWS.

Services Angle

AWS Elasticache shows how modern service providers create opportunities. AWS saw the complexity developers faced in installing, deploying and managing Memecached. AWS automated the process. They made it easier for the developer. And that’s the key to being a great services provider.