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ElastiCache for Redis

Homepage

https://aws.amazon.com/elasticache/

What is it?

ElastiCache is AWS' cache server offering. Cache servers are used, as the name implies, for caching: to provide higher performance where data doesn't need to be absolutely up-to-date, or when data might be requested very frequently.

Why did we choose it?

Similar to RDS, the main reason was AWS integration, but also that ElastiCache servers are reasonably priced, meaning there wasn't any real reason to go looking for alternatives.

What do we use it for?

A couple of things:

  • Caching various credentials the webservers need to access certain resources, rather than querying the database all the time
  • Storing user sessions, instead of storing them on the webservers. Having user sessions stored in one location means multiple webservers can serve the same user and still remember the correct login session.
  • Caching temporary data like the results of a particular search for a short time, to reduce load on the database servers.
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