An overview of Amazon ElastiCache
Amazon ElastiCache is a fully managed database caching solution that offers two different caching technologies, Redis and Memcached. We will look in more depth at these different engines in the next section. By being a fully managed service, AWS takes ownership of any patching of databases and virtual machines on which they are running. ElastiCache uses a specialized instance class called cache, which is optimized for memory to allow the caching service to work as efficiently as possible.
You can think of ElastiCache in a similar way to RDS in that it is a service wrapper that handles the day-to-day tasks, such as patching, backups, and the monitoring of a database engine, rather than being a database engine itself. RDS offers a choice of several different database engines, such as PostgreSQL and Oracle, in the same way that ElastiCache offers Redis and Memcached. As such, the features available will differ depending on which engine you chose.
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