In a recent blog post, Google announced the general availability of Memorystore for Memcached, a fully-managed service compatible with open-source Memcached protocol. With the GA release of Memorystore for Memcached, the company now has two generally available managed caching service options for customers looking for a caching capability in the Google Cloud.
A year ago, the public cloud provider released the service in beta as an additional choice for caching next to their existing Memorystore for Redis offering. Since the preview, Google has continued to improve the service. One of the key areas was improving the self-service software updates – and with the GA release, customers will have complete control of how mandatory software updates are applied to their Memcached instance. Through an API, they can control the time and rate at which updates are applied across the nodes in their Memcached instance. Furthermore, the GA release also includes an uptime SLA of 99.9%.
Memcached is fully compatible with the open-source Memcached protocol, which is popular as a front-end cache for databases. Moreover, its compatibility lets customers quickly migrate applications from self-deployed Memcached or other cloud providers without any code changes. Furthermore, customers can benefit from the scaling options – they can easily scale instances up or down to optimize the preferred cache-hit ratio and price. The documentation states users can scale the number of nodes in a cluster down to a minimum of one node or up to a maximum of 20 nodes. And lastly, the service also:
- Offers an auto-discovery protocol that should make it easier to deal with changes to the number of nodes during scaling
- Allows access from applications running on Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), App Engine Flex, App Engine Standard, and Cloud Functions
Another benefit of the service for its users is the available rich set of monitoring metrics.
Source: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/memorystore-for-memcached-now-ga
Quizlet, one of the largest online learning platforms globally serving students and teachers with intelligent study tools ranging from digital flashcards and practice questions to interactive diagrams and games, uses the Memcached service. Mason Leung, site reliability engineer at Quizlet, wrote in his Google Cloud blog post about their move to Memcached:
The switch to Memorystore has made scaling so much easier, and has eliminated a lot of stress for the SRE team. In addition: cost reduction, bigger footprint, and reduced Memcached ops time; we also have easier monitoring now, thanks to the integrations of Google Cloud Operations suite with Memorystore.
Memorystore, including the Memcached service, is available in all Google Cloud regions and guidance through the quick start page. Furthermore, there is a Memorystore for Memcached Node.js client available. Lastly, the pricing details are available on the pricing page.