What is Amazon ElastiCache (Redis OSS)?
Welcome to the Amazon ElastiCache (Redis OSS) User Guide. Amazon ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to set up, manage, and scale a distributed in-memory data store or cache environment in the cloud. It provides a high-performance, scalable, and cost-effective caching solution. At the same time, it helps remove the complexity associated with deploying and managing a distributed cache environment.
You can operate Amazon ElastiCache in two formats. You can get started with a serverless cache or choose to design your own cache cluster.
Note
Amazon ElastiCache works with both the Redis OSS and Memcached engines. Use the guide for the engine that you're interested in. If you're unsure which engine you want to use, see Comparing Memcached and Redis OSS self-designed caches in this guide.
Serverless caching
ElastiCache (Redis OSS) offers serverless caching, which simplifies adding and operating a Redis-based cache for your application. ElastiCache (Redis OSS) Serverless enables you to create a highly available cache in under a minute, and eliminates the need to provision instances or configure nodes or clusters. Developers can create a Serverless cache by specifying the cache name using the ElastiCache console, SDK or CLI.
ElastiCache (Redis OSS) Serverless also removes the need to plan and manage caching capacity. ElastiCache (Redis OSS) constantly monitors the cache’s memory, compute, and network bandwidth used by your application, and scales to meet the needs of your application. ElastiCache (Redis OSS) offers a simple endpoint experience for developers, by abstracting the underlying cache infrastructure and cluster design. ElastiCache (Redis OSS) manages hardware provisioning, monitoring, node replacements, and software patching automatically and transparently, so that you can focus on application development, rather than operating the cache.
ElastiCache (Redis OSS) Serverless is compatible with Redis OSS 7.1 and above.
Designing your own ElastiCache (Redis OSS) cluster
If you need fine-grained control over your ElastiCache (Redis OSS) cluster, you can choose to design your own Redis OSS cluster with ElastiCache. ElastiCache enables you to design your cluster, by choosing the node-type, number of nodes, and node placement across AWS 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.
Designing your own ElastiCache (Redis OSS) cluster offers greater flexibility and control over your clusters. For example, you can choose to operate a cluster with single-AZ availability or multi-AZ availability depending on your needs. You can also choose to run Redis OSS in cluster mode enabling horizontal scaling, or without cluster mode for just scaling vertically. When designing your own clusters, you are responsible for choosing the type and number of nodes correctly to ensure that your cache has enough capacity as required by your application. You can also choose when to apply new software patches to your Redis OSS cluster.
When designing your own ElastiCache (Redis OSS) cluster, you can choose to run Redis OSS 3.0 and above.