Amazon ElastiCache | Overview & Hands-On.

Amazon ElastiCache - Overview & Hands-On.

• Amazon ElastiCache is a fully managed, in-memory data store and cache service from AWS that supports two popular open-source engines: Redis and Memcached. 
• It’s designed to improve application performance by retrieving data from a fast, low-latency, in-memory cache rather than slower disk-based databases.

 Key Benefits

Benefit	Description
Ultra-Fast Performance	Microsecond latency for read/write operations.
Scalability	Scale out with sharding (Redis) or by adding nodes.
High Availability	Support for Multi-AZ with automatic failover (Redis only).
Security	Integrated with VPC, encryption in transit/at rest, IAM, and security groups.
Managed Service	Patching, monitoring, backups, and node recovery handled by AWS.

 Supported Engines

Engine	Best For	Features
Redis	Advanced data structures, persistence, pub/sub, replication	Backup/restore, Multi-AZ, clustering
Memcached	Simpler cache use cases, horizontal scaling	In-memory key-value cache, multi-threaded

 Use Cases

• Caching frequently accessed DB queries, session state, or objects
• Leaderboards or real-time analytics
• Message queues or pub/sub systems (Redis)
• Gaming, ad tech, financial trading systems where latency matters

 How It Works

1. twtech app queries ElastiCache first.
2. If data is cached, it’s returned instantly.
3. If not, the app fetches from the database and optionally stores the result in ElastiCache.
4. TTL (Time-To-Live) is set to expire old cache entries.

Scaling Options

• Redis:
• Clustering for partitioning and high availability.
• Replication with failover for resilience.
• Memcached:
• Horizontal scaling by adding/removing nodes.
• No replication or persistence.

 Security & Monitoring

• IAM for access control (management layer)
• VPC for network isolation
• Amazon CloudWatch for performance monitoring
• Encryption at rest/in transit (Redis only)

 twtech Sample Architectures

• Web App + RDS + Redis for database query caching
• Lambda + API Gateway + Redis for session/state caching
• Microservices + Redis for pub/sub or job queues

Quick Setup via Console

1. Go to the ElastiCache Console.
2. Choose Redis or Memcached.
3. Select cluster mode and configuration (nodes, engine version).

Launch and connect using the endpoint URL.

Project: Hands-on

How twtech creates and use Amazon Elasticache

Step-1:

Search for aws service: Elasticache.

• Get started with type: Redis OSS

Step-2:

• Create Redis OSS cache

Cluster mode

• twtech Scales its cluster dynamically with no downtime.

• Cluster info
• Use the following options to configure the cluster

• For more availability, Multi-AZ should to be: enabled

Or: 

• Disenabled

• Cache settings
• Use the following options to configure the cluster.

• Subnet group settings: create a new subnet group

• Subnets are auto-selected, but twtech may decide to:  manage the subnets

For AZ placements, twtech may specify particular:  AZ,

• Availability Zone placements
• Use the following fields to configure placements for Availability Zones

For: 

Advanced settings

• Access control: twtech uses this to specify who is allowed to access the Elasticache cluster or the path
• Provides the ability to configure authenticating and authorizing access.

Or: 

• Disable encryption in transit: the application will have access from the network

Or

• No backups:

• Maintenance
• Configure maintenance settings for the cluster.

• Configure for Logs management: 

Or:  

• Disabled logs management 

Tags
twtech can use tags to search and filter its clusters, or track its AWS costs.

• Review and create

From: 

• Creating

To: 

• Available

• Endpoints: