Amazon ElastiCache: An Architecture Deep-Dive
ElastiCache looks easy. Deploy a managed cache, point your app at the endpoint, enjoy sub-millisecond reads. Then production happens. Engine selection, cluster topology, eviction policy, replication strategy, connection management, failover behavior: every one of these choices determines whether your caching layer holds up or collapses at 3 AM on a Saturday. I've spent years building and running ElastiCache clusters serving millions of requests per second. Some fronted relational databases with multi-terabyte datasets. Others were dead-simple session stores. All of them taught me something. Usually through failure first.