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Elasticache Exam Tips

  • Typically, you will be given a scenario where a particular database is under a lot of stress/load. You may be asked which service you should use to alleviate this.
    • Elasticache is a good answer if your database is particularly read-heavy and not prone to frequent changing.
    • Redshift is a good answer if the reason your database is feeling stress is because management keep running OLAP (Online Analytics Processing) transactions on it, etc.
    • Basically, for data warehousing, using Redshift; for simply taking stress off of your database, use Elasticache.
  • Use Memcached if
    • Object caching is your primary goal
    • You want to keep things as simple as possible
    • You want to scale your cache horizontally (scale out)
  • Use Redis if
    • You have advanced data types, such as lists, hashes and sets.
    • You are doing data sorting and ranking (such as leader boards)
    • Data persistence
    • Multi-AZ
    • Pub/Sub capabilities are needed