What is your experience with Elastic Cache?

I have experience working with Amazon ElastiCache to improve application responsiveness through data caching. I used it as a distributed cache for sessions and frequently requested but rarely changed data.

I worked with two engines:

• Redis: Used for implementing Pub/Sub, caching JSON data, and lists. I prefer Redis for its versatility and support for various data structures.
• Memcached: Used for simple key-value caching where advanced Redis features were not required.

Main tasks I solved with ElastiCache:

• Reducing database load: Caching results of frequent queries significantly decreased the number of requests to the primary database.
• Speeding up user sessions: Storing session data in ElastiCache provided quick access across different application instances.
• Managing cache lifecycle: Configured eviction policies (e.g., LRU - Least Recently Used) and key expiration times (TTL - Time To Live).

Configured ElastiCache clusters, including:

• Selection of node type
• Network configuration and security groups
• Scaling (horizontal and vertical)

Used AWS CloudWatch monitoring tools to track key metrics such as:

• Cache Hit Ratio
• CPU Utilization
• Network Throughput

Example of Redis cluster connection configuration:

# Example application configuration fragment
cache:
  type: redis
  host: my-redis-cluster.xxxxxx.ng.0001.euc1.cache.amazonaws.com # Redis cluster endpoint
  port: 6379
  timeout: 5000 # Connection timeout in milliseconds

Familiar with Redis Cluster Mode features, including data sharding for performance and scalability.

Able to integrate ElastiCache with applications on various frameworks and programming languages using appropriate client libraries.