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Announcing Amazon ElastiCache - Managed Memcached
- atlbeer 15y agoI was excited at first until I realized this is merely just an AWS-managed memcache cluster. I was really hoping for another layer of abstraction away from the server level and more just an interface. More like SimpleDB than RDS to use the AWS analogy.
- axomhacker 15y agoInteresting. For a key-value store what could be another abstraction though?
- atlbeer 15y agorbranon did a better job explaining what I was after than I did http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=2915491 http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=2915491
- natrius 15y agoELB 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.
- robryan 15y agoYou would think they should be able to offer it cheaper, as they will be able organise it to get a lot more users/ CPU usage per server than the usage they would typically get from an average EC2 server.
- wmf 15y agoNot really, considering that RAM is RAM.
- TomOfTTB 15y agoI'm almost certain they could offer it cheaper and have chosen not to. If you look at AWS' history they tend to price higher than they need to and then aggressively lower the prices after the service is established. I've always assumed this is part of a very conservative business plan where they establish the actual cost of running the service (as opposed to projections) over time. Once they've established they can actually run the service as cheaply as projected they lower the price accordingly. Remember Amazon isn't a startup. It is an established company with shareholders to keep happy. Given that I think the above strategy is a sensible one (and is probably why AWS has been profitable from the very beginning)
- stock_toaster 15y agoCheaper than running your own _external_ load balancer. I really wish amazon released an internal only (cross AZ if applicable) load balancer with cheaper transit costs.
- vessenes 15y agoIt 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. Until then, this makes sense only for mid-large scale memcache deployments, similar to Amazon's RDS.
- rbranson 15y agoAgreed, the value add isn't very high, especially since the pricing is higher than EC2. Surely there are some economies that could be found on servers with no disks and reduced CPU requirements? I wonder if ECC could even be done away with if they checksummed all the stored values? It would be a real killer if they had incremental pricing (per-GB-hour) with an adjustable high watermark / replica count, and a name/port-based endpoint that always worked and routed requests to the proper cache server.
- vessenes 15y agoI agree, that would be great. Let's start a company that does that.
- rbranson 15y agoAt current RAM prices, one can build a cheap 2U SuperServer with 144GB of ECC DDR3 1333MHz RAM, a single quad-core 40W 2.13GHz Westmere processor, a 10gig-E card, and a 4GB CompactFlash drive for ~$4,000. Assuming the server has a 3-year lifespan and costs ~$4,000 to power, cool, house, network, and administer, that's around $0.0021/GB-hr considering 143GB of it is usable. Double that to ~$0.0043 for redundancy, and they could charge $0.02/GB-hr and make a healthy profit. Edit: Note that a lot of that profit gets eaten up in underutilized capacity, this is just a simplistic analysis.
- jann 15y agoThe problem is that you need to provide the other services as well. Having your database and application server in one datacenter, but your memcached instance in another would reduce the use-cases because of latency and bandwidth restrictions.
- flyt 15y agoRelated post on All Things Distributed by Amazon's CTO: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2011/08/amazon-elasticache.html http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2011/08/amazon-elasticac... and on the AWS Engineering blog: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/08/amazon-elasticache-distributed-in-memory-caching.html http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/08/amazon-elasticache-distri...
- url2png 15y agoWeeee, this infinite signup loop is a blast! 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
- jeffbarr 15y agoWhoops, that's not good. Email your AWS account number to me and I'll pass it along to the team.
- gsharma 15y agoI 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.
- harlowja 15y agoIt seems to be a memcache compatible interface. So its really hard to tell what they used underneath the covers. Perhaps a modified memcache for there needs...
- nesbot 15y agoIs 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.
- thadeus_venture 15y agoSo 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. 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..
- jacques_chester 15y agoIt may or may not be memcached -- it merely speaks the same protocol. I would not be totally amazed if something else is running underneath now or in future.
- thadeus_venture 15y agoThat is definitely plausible, but I'm more referring to the feature set, i guess i would clarify as the contract between them and the developer. That is basically memcached, from what i understood from their blog posts. As far as memcached itself goes, i hear it does what it does quite well, but that's ot.
- agotterer 15y agoIn the FAQ it states "Each Cache Node runs an instance of the Memcached software and has its own DNS name and port". So it looks like it is running memcached and not just talking it.
- ww520 15y agoIt sounds great but it's kind of expensive.
- ck2 15y agoDoesn't latency kill the usefulness of any cloud based cache?
- dabeeeenster 15y agoMost of the AWS services are designed to be used together, so you'd have an EC2 instance in the same data center as the memcache service.
- colinhowe 15y agoThis would have been more awesome if the clusters had an address and handled the sharding for you. 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.
- Shtirlic 15y agoAmazon Y U NO Redis?
- pkulak 15y agoThis would be nice if the cheapest option didn't end up costing 3 times as much as my entire AWS server itself.
- agotterer 15y agoIs 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?
- n3m6 15y agoI don't understand. Wouldn't network IO latency be higher than memory access? and wouldn't that beat the purpose of having a memcache?
- taylorbuley 15y ago$0.095 * 24 * 30 = $68.40 for 24/7 coverage on a typical month Sort of pricey for 1.3 GB memory