Choosing between deployment options

Amazon ElastiCache has two deployment options:

Serverless caching
Design your own cluster

Serverless caching

Amazon ElastiCache Serverless simplifies cache creation and instantly scales to support customers' most demanding applications. With ElastiCache Serverless, you can create a highly-available and scalable cache in less than a minute, eliminating the need to provision, plan for, and manage cache cluster capacity. ElastiCache Serverless automatically stores data redundantly across three Availability Zones and provides a 99.99% availability Service Level Agreement (SLA). ElastiCache provides automatic data replication across AZs eliminating the need to manually manage replicas and custom software to keep them in sync.

Self-designed clusters

If you need fine-grained control over your ElastiCache (Memcached) cluster, you can choose to design your own Memcached cluster with ElastiCache. ElastiCache enables you to operate a node-based cluster, by choosing the node-type, number of nodes, and node placement across Amazon Availability Zones for your cluster. Since ElastiCache is a fully-managed service, it automatically manages hardware provisioning, monitoring, node replacements, and software patching for your cluster.

Choosing between deployment options

Choose Serverless caching if:

You are creating a new cache for new or unknown workloads
You have unpredictable application traffic
You want the easiest way to get started with a cache

Choose to design your own ElastiCache cluster if:

You are already running ElastiCache Serverless, and want finer grained control over the type of node running Memcached, number of nodes, and placement of nodes.
You don’t expect your application traffic to fluctuate much or you can accurately predict your application traffic peaks and troughs.
You can forecast your capacity requirements to control costs.