Question: What is ElastiCache Memcached?

Answer

Amazon ElastiCache is a managed caching service that provides an in-memory key-value store. It offers two popular open-source in-memory caching engines - Memcached and Redis.

ElastiCache Memcached is one of the two caching engines offered by ElastiCache, the other being Redis. ElastiCache for Memcached is a fully managed, distributed caching system used to speed up dynamic web applications by easing the load on databases.

Memcached is an open-source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system. It stores data in RAM, which makes it faster than disk-based databases. Memcached is widely used as a caching layer in various web applications such as e-commerce, social networking, and gaming to reduce database load and response times.

ElastiCache for Memcached is a fully managed service, meaning Amazon manages the underlying infrastructure, including hardware, software updates, backups, and monitoring. ElastiCache for Memcached enables customers to create and deploy Memcached clusters with ease. The service also supports automatic failover and node replacement, scaling, and security features such as encryption, authentication, and access control.

Here's an example of how to launch an ElastiCache Memcached cluster using the AWS CLI:

aws elasticache create-cache-cluster --cache-cluster-id my-memcached-cluster \
--engine memcached --num-cache-nodes 2 --cache-node-type cache.m4.large \
--preferred-availability-zones us-east-1a,us-east-1b

This command creates an ElastiCache Memcached cluster called "my-memcached-cluster" with two cache nodes of type "cache.m4.large" in the preferred availability zones "us-east-1a" and "us-east-1b". Once the cluster is created, you can use it to store and retrieve data using the Memcached protocol.