[chewbranca]

I agree that the value add isn't significantly high for small cluster type of situations, and I would much rather just have a caching API available that charges on usage and allows you to specify an amount of redundancy.

However, the automatic failovers is very nice. From Vogel's blog: "Amazon ElastiCache automatically detects and replaces failed Cache Nodes to protect the cluster from those failure scenarios." That is definitely nice.

Elasticache does seem to be sitting in an awkward middle ground between renting of instances and paying for usage in an API.

Edit: after thinking about it more and reading some of the comments, I think an ideal setup would be an API to a memcached like datastore with buckets so I can specify max-size, redundancy, expiration methods, etc on a per bucket basis. Even nicer setup would be all of that plus redundancy and HA across availability zones and regions.

[nknight]

> I think an ideal setup would be an API to a memcached like datastore with buckets so I can specify max-size, redundancy, expiration methods, etc on a per bucket basis.

Raising the question of why Amazon didn't adapt its S3 API to the task, and then layer an optional memcached-compatible wrapper on top of it.