AWS ElastiCache are in memory databases with very high performance and low latency. They designed to reduce the load on databases for high levels of reads. They allow your application to be stateless by placing the placing the current state of the data into ElastiCache. AWS takes care of OS maintenance, optimization, setup, configuration, monitoring, recovery and backup of the ElastiCache making it transparent to customer. Normally you have to perform a lot of code changes for existing application to use the ElastiCache option.
ElastiCache Security characteristics:
- For Redis IAM Authentication is support
- All other ElastiCache options require username and password
- IAM policies are only used for AWS API level security
- Redis AUTH
- You can set password/token where creating a Redis cluster
- Providing extra layer of security for you cache above you security group
- Support SSL for network encryption.
- Memcached
- Supports SASL based authentication
ElastiCache – Redis Use Case:
- Establishing the leader in a game.
- Each time a new score is added, it is ranked against all other scores (sorted) and presented in correct order.
- This guarantees that the leader is always displayed at the top and in descending order.