Choosing between deployment options - Amazon ElastiCache
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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.

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