Here is a good news for the ones who would like to speed up their webapp my providing in memory cache equivalent to memcached without the overhead to setup and manage memcached. Whats more, the api is compliant with memcached, so migrating to Elasticache is a breeze.
In their own words, Amazon ElastiCache is a new web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud. The service improves the performance of web applications by allowing you to retrieve information from a fast, managed, in-memory caching system and is protocol-compliant with Memcached. Amazon ElastiCache simplifies and offloads the management, monitoring, and operation of in-memory cache environments, enabling you to focus on the differentiating parts of your applications. The service is ideal for many read-heavy application workloads (such as social networking, gaming, media sharing and Q&A portals) or compute-intensive workloads (such as a recommendation engine). You can easily get started by viewing a quick demo or reviewing the Getting Started Guide, and launch a pre-configured Cache Cluster in minutes.
Quick setup, preconfigured parameters, push button scaling and no administrative overhead are some of the features of ElastiCache. There are seven differnt types of instances available for elasticache pricing from 9.5 cents for a small instance to 76cents for extra large instances.
