[thadeus_venture]

So this is just a simple way to get some memcached instances running. I guess it makes sense for amazon to target memcached since it's still the most popular caching system in use, and probably the easiest for newbies to get into, but it is very old technology at this point. There is no built in support for clustering, replication, or durability. There are solutions out there that provide a much better feature set. Heh, where did the original dynamo paper come from? All in all, underwhelming.

EDIT: I guess i forgot to mention the most obvious reason of all to go with memcached - what they have rolled out is by far the easiest caching system to implement. Not trolling, just stating the facts..

[jacques_chester]

It may or may not be memcached -- it merely speaks the same protocol. I would not be totally amazed if something else is running underneath now or in future.

[agotterer]

In the FAQ it states "Each Cache Node runs an instance of the Memcached software and has its own DNS name and port". So it looks like it is running memcached and not just talking it.

[thadeus_venture]

That is definitely plausible, but I'm more referring to the feature set, i guess i would clarify as the contract between them and the developer. That is basically memcached, from what i understood from their blog posts. As far as memcached itself goes, i hear it does what it does quite well, but that's ot.