
Announcing Amazon ElastiCache - Managed Memcached - cardmagic
http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2011/08/22/announcing-amazon-elasticache/
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vessenes
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.

Until then, this makes sense only for mid-large scale memcache deployments,
similar to Amazon's RDS.

~~~
rbranson
Agreed, 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.

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vessenes
I agree, that would be great. Let's start a company that does that.

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jann
The 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.

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wmf
We recently got a step closer to integrating multiple clouds now that EC2
allows peering. <http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/> To really make it easy
you'd probably want federated auth and billing, but I'm not sure that's in
Amazon's interest.

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flyt
Related post on All Things Distributed by Amazon's CTO:

[http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2011/08/amazon-
elasticac...](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2011/08/amazon-
elasticache.html)

and on the AWS Engineering blog:

[http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/08/amazon-elasticache-
distri...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/08/amazon-elasticache-distributed-
in-memory-caching.html)

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atlbeer
I 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.

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axomhacker
Interesting. For a key-value store what could be another abstraction though?

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atlbeer
rbranon did a better job explaining what I was after than I did

<http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=2915491>

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natrius
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.

~~~
robryan
You 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.

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TomOfTTB
I'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)

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gsharma
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.

~~~
harlowja
It 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...

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agotterer
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?

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taylorbuley
$0.095 * 24 * 30 = $68.40 for 24/7 coverage on a typical month

Sort of pricey for 1.3 GB memory

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nesbot
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.

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colinhowe
This 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.

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thadeus_venture
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.

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..

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jacques_chester
It 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.

~~~
agotterer
In 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.

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url2png
Weeee, 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

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jeffbarr
Whoops, that's not good. Email your AWS account number to me and I'll pass it
along to the team.

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

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ck2
Doesn't latency kill the usefulness of any cloud based cache?

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dabeeeenster
Most 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.

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ww520
It sounds great but it's kind of expensive.

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Shtirlic
Amazon Y U NO Redis?

