Re: Annoucing memcache-ada 0.1

["R. Tyler Croy" <tyler@linux.com>]

Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 16, 9:52 pm, "R. Tyler Croy" <ty...@linux.com> wrote:
> 
>> I hope somebody finds it useful, can't wait to see some examples of caching
>> with AWS! :D
> 
> The biggest advantage of AWS, when compared to "traditional" web-
> server hosting stateless scripts, is that AWS is stateful and being an
> in-process part of the complete application makes out-of-process
> caching useless.
> In other words, with AWS there is no need to cache anything in a
> separate process, because data can be stored for future use as a
> regular object in the program. This is not just faster, but also
> safer.
> 
> I have to admit, however, that web technologies are not my strongest
> point and I might miss some interesting use cases.

Heh, that's fine, lucky for you my whole job is in web technologies ;)

Anyways, the big advantages I can see with coupling AWS with memcached by way of
memcache-ada are:

    * Scaling to N web servers serving dynamic content, using a network-attached
      cache such as memcached, you could have web01 do the heavy lifting generating a
      page and then all the other webs (web02 - web05 for example) serve the cached
      version of the page. This can be accomplished via other means via Nginx or
      Varnish (for example), but neither of those will be able to cache arbitrary
      chunks of computed data, merely the responses

    * Providing an intermediary layer to your backing data store (MySQL, PostgreSQL,
      etc). While each RDMS has some amount of in-process caching, it can't really
      compare to the ability to continually add memcached instances. We use
      ~64GB of memcached storage at $WORKPLACE for caching various bits of data here
      and there, this is at the low-end for most big web companies. Indexes can only
      go so far, you can get a lot of mileage out of cheap caching of results from
      your DB.

I'm not sure what AWS is capable of in terms of the Distributed Systems Annex,
but I've never found a web project that couldn't be improved by a little extra
caching here and there :)


Cheers

-- 
- R. Tyler Croy
--------------------------------------
    Code: http://github.com/rtyler