In today's world, real-time web and mobile apps, such as gaming, media, social, and many other internet-scale applications, need high-throughput and low-latency performance, along with high concurrency. In order to achieve this for read-heavy applications, it is essential to store frequently used data on the memory rather than on a disk. Many a time when an application is hosted on EC2 or on-premises servers, we encounter memory (RAM) scarcity.
When you encounter memory issues, you can neither keep on adding more memory, nor can you keep scaling these servers vertically, as it would be expensive. Similarly, when we scale the environment horizontally, it adds operational overheads and may not necessarily resolve memory issues at the instance level.
This chapter elaborates on how ElastiCache can be helpful in handling more memory needs. The following topics...