[nicois]

The redis/memcache example doesn't make a lot of sense to me, unless the idea is that a separate memcache instance is deployed alongside each backend, while redis would have been a single instance.

I'm all for boring technology; reimplementing web protocols and semantics in JS is a disaster - and would probably have made a clearer case study than comparing to memory-first database caches.

[the_gipsy]

Especially when he said that some people did have to work on that setup to scale it up. Sounds like devops work, so the same would have happened with redis, right?

[CamouflagedKiwi]

He covers this - the operational setup & expertise to scale Memcached already existed because Etsy already used it elsewhere. It would have had to be built and learned (mostly) separately for Redis.

[the_gipsy]

I meant the part where he talks about maintenance later on.

[ryanbrunner]

Maintenance is also something that has to be learned (and "built up" in the sense that you're going to accumulate playbooks and processes over time).

If a team already existed that knew the ins and outs of memcached, knew how to resolve any problems it encountered, already had appropriate monitoring / alarms / etc, that's a massive leg up over needing to do all that with a completely new technology.