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ElastiCache

Links: 101 AWS SAA Index
Recommended Reads: ElastiCache DVA

Amazon ElastiCache can be used to significantly improve latency and throughput 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).

Introduction

  • It is managed Redis or memcached.
  • In memory database with high performance and low latency which provides caching.
  • Helps reduce load off of databases for read intensive workloads. Common queries are going to be cached.
  • Elasticache offers sub millisecond latency. DynamoDB offers sub microsecond latency.
  • Not suitable for highly dynamic reads. In that case it is better to get a read replica.
  • ElastiCache Redis has a good use case for autocompletion.
  • Helps in making the application stateless without using ALB stick sessions.
  • ElastiCache Redis is HIPAA eligible and PCI DSS compliant. ElatiCache memcached is not HIPAA compliant.
  • Since Aurora and RDS have no in built caching Elastic Cache is a good use case. In case of NOSQL DynamoDB, DAX is much better than ElastiCache. In short ElastiCache Redis is better suited for SQL databases.
Using Elasticache requires heavy application code changes.
  • While using caching the cache must have an invalidation strategy to make sure only the most current data is used in there.
How is memcached different from redis?
  • Memcached is highly distributed and multi threaded and you use it in applications where you can afford to lose data.
  • Redis is multi AZ and highly available whereas memcached is not.
  • Redis has backup and restore features whereas memcached doesn't
All caches in elasticache DONT support IAM authentication.
Redis key words: Sets and Sorted Sets.

Security

  • We have SGs in ElasticCache also.

Redis Auth

  • Using Redis AUTH command can improve data security by requiring the user to enter a password/token before they are granted permission to execute Redis commands on a password-protected Redis server.
  • Support SSL in flight encryption.
  • Parameters that can be provided while creating a redis cluster:
    • --auth-token: for redis auth
    • --transit-encryption-enabled: for transit encryption.
    • AtRestEncryptionEnabled: encrypts in memory data.

Memcached

  • It supports SASL based authentication.

Patterns in Elastic Cache

  • Lazy loading: You write to the cache only when there is a cache miss.
  • Write through: Write to cache when written to DB - no stale data.
  • Session Store: Refresh cache on expiry of TTL.

For more info on caching patterns refer Caching Strategies

Last updated: 2023-03-05