Announcing Amazon ElastiCache - Managed Memcached

It would be great, really great, if this were priced per-gigabyte of RAM and per-gig transferred. To my mind, memcache should be billed and used more like a CDN.<p>Until then, this makes sense only for mid-large scale memcache deployments, similar to Amazon's RDS.

Related post on All Things Distributed by Amazon's CTO:<p><a href="http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2011/08/amazon-elasticache.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2011/08/amazon-elasticac...</a><p>and on the AWS Engineering blog:<p><a href="http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/08/amazon-elasticache-distributed-in-memory-caching.html" rel="nofollow">http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/08/amazon-elasticache-distri...</a>

I was excited at first until I realized this is merely just an AWS-managed memcache cluster.<p>I was really hoping for another layer of abstraction away from the server level and more just an interface.<p>More like SimpleDB than RDS to use the AWS analogy.

ELB is cheaper than running your own EC2 load balancer, but ElastiCache is more expensive than the same raw EC2 servers. It makes sense, but I was hoping it'd be as much of a no-brainer as ELB was.

I would have liked it a lot more if they launched a Redis like version with persistence storage than memcache. I wonder why they considered Memcache over Redis.

Is the failover mechanism just a hardware replacement where you need to repopulate the cache or are they doing some kind of "slave" hotswap that the replaced hardware already has the cache?

$0.095 * 24 * 30 = $68.40 for 24/7 coverage on a typical month<p>Sort of pricey for 1.3 GB memory

Is there a part of the typical web stack that they don't offer a solution for or does this pretty much cover it. I know you can always run whatever they don't yourself just on another ec2 instance, but I think you can offload everything (but your app) now to their services.

This would have been more awesome if the clusters had an address and handled the sharding for you.<p>As it stands, getting a memcached server up and running is so trivial that this probably isn't worth the extra cost for anyone on a small scale and already using things like chef or puppet.

So this is just a simple way to get some memcached instances running. I guess it makes sense for amazon to target memcached since it's still the most popular caching system in use, and probably the easiest for newbies to get into, but it is very old technology at this point. There is no built in support for clustering, replication, or durability. There are solutions out there that provide a much better feature set. Heh, where did the original dynamo paper come from? All in all, underwhelming.<p>EDIT: I guess i forgot to mention the most obvious reason of all to go with memcached - what they have rolled out is by far the easiest caching system to implement. Not trolling, just stating the facts..

Weeee, this infinite signup loop is a blast!<p>10 You already have access to Amazon ElastiCache 20 You must sign up for Amazon ElastiCache before you can use the Amazon ElastiCache Console. GOTO 10

This would be nice if the cheapest option didn't end up costing 3 times as much as my entire AWS server itself.

Doesn't latency kill the usefulness of any cloud based cache?

It sounds great but it's kind of expensive.

Amazon Y U NO Redis?