All 7 Amazon ElastiCache (Redis & Memcached) questions
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What is the main difference between the Redis and Memcached engines in ElastiCache? How does replication work in ElastiCache for Redis to provide high availability? What caching strategies are commonly implemented using ElastiCache, such as lazy loading and write through? How does ElastiCache for Redis support cluster mode to scale beyond a single node's capacity? How can ElastiCache be secured within a VPC, and what encryption options are available? What monitoring metrics are most important to track for an ElastiCache deployment in production?
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What is Amazon ElastiCache and why do applications use it?

Beginner

Answer

Amazon ElastiCache is a fully managed in memory caching service that supports both the Redis and Memcached engines, letting applications store frequently accessed data in extremely fast memory instead of repeatedly querying a slower disk based database, which significantly reduces latency and takes load off your primary database for read heavy workloads.
aws elasticache create-cache-cluster --cache-cluster-id my-cache --engine redis --cache-node-type cache.t3.micro --num-cache-nodes 1
Real-world example An online store caches its frequently viewed product details in ElastiCache, so repeat requests for the same popular items are served in milliseconds without needing to query the main database every single time.

Common follow-ups: What is the difference between Redis and Memcached engines?;When should an application use caching versus querying the database directly?

RDS & Databases;Amazon DynamoDB
All 7 Amazon ElastiCache (Redis & Memcached) questions