I'd think that most of the requests being served by rapgenius.com would be highly cacheable (99% are likely just people viewing content that rarely changes). S

I'd think that most of the requests being served by rapgenius.com would be highly cacheable (99% are likely just people viewing content that rarely changes). Seems weird that the site would have such a massive load of non-cacheable traffic. Heroku used to offer free and automatic varnish caching, but the cedar stack removed it. Some architectures make it easy to use cloudfront to cache most of the data being served. My guess that refactoring the app to lean on cloudfront would be easier and more cost-effective (and faster) than manually managing custom scaling infrastructure on EC2.