ElasticCache Essentials:

• ElasticCache is a fully managed, in-memory cache engine.
• ElasticCache is used to improve database performance by caching results of queries that are made to a database.
• ElasticCache is great for large, high-performance or high-taxing queries - and can store them inside of a cache (Elastic Cache Cluster) that can be accessed later (instead of repeat request continually hitting the primary database).
• So it reduces load on the database, which increases performance.
• ElasticCache allows for managing web sessions, and also caching dynamic generated data.
• Available engines to power ElasticCache include:
  • Memcached (Mem-Cache-D)
  • Redis
• Generally, the application needs to be built to work with either Redis or Memcached.
• Popular options like MySQL have Memcached plugins, which allow an application to easily work with ElasticCache (if using Memcached as the engine).