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Amazon ElastiCache

Amazon ElastiCache provides managed Valkey, Redis OSS, and Memcached in-memory caches through serverless or node-based deployments for lower-latency, lower-load application access.

Explore pricing models, common use cases, infrastructure support, and the AWS services that commonly work with Amazon ElastiCache.

Amazon ElastiCache pricing and cost programs

Pricing model: Managed cache usage

On-Demand
Available
Reserved Instances or reserved capacity
Available
Savings Plans
Available
Spot
Not applicable

Billing dimensions: Node or processing-unit time · Storage · Data transfer · Backups

Programs and modes: On-Demand Nodes · Reserved Nodes · ElastiCache Serverless · Database Savings Plans

Node-based and Serverless deployments have different dimensions; reserved pricing applies to eligible nodes.

Free Tier: Service-specific — verify current offers

Pricing reviewed 2026-07-25. Reviewed against the linked official AWS pricing page. Recheck regional rates and program terms before purchase.

Official AWS pricing

Official AWS sources reviewed 2026-07-21.

Why implement Amazon ElastiCache?

  • Reduces database and service load by serving reusable data from memory with sub-millisecond access for many operations.
  • Automates cache-node provisioning, patching, replacement, monitoring, scaling features, replication, and failover according to engine and deployment mode.
  • Supports Valkey and Redis OSS data structures or Memcached's simpler distributed cache model, with AWS networking and security integrations.

How to implement Amazon ElastiCache

  1. Choose Valkey, Redis OSS, or Memcached and serverless or node-based deployment from data structures, persistence, availability, scaling, compatibility, and operational requirements.
  2. Create the cache in private subnets with security groups, encryption in transit and at rest where supported, authentication or access controls, maintenance, and backup settings.
  3. Implement cache-aside or another explicit consistency pattern with namespaced keys, bounded TTLs, serialization, connection pooling, timeouts, backoff, and behavior for misses, eviction, failure, and topology change.

Amazon ElastiCache best practices

  • Treat cached data as disposable unless the selected engine and architecture deliberately provide durability; ensure the source of truth can repopulate it without a destructive load spike.
  • Use replicas and Multi-AZ automatic failover for supported production configurations, spread shards and keys appropriately, and test client recovery during node replacement and failover.
  • Restrict network and identity access, use TLS and authentication, patch during controlled windows, and monitor hit rate, memory, evictions, CPU, connections, latency, replication, and hot keys.

Amazon ElastiCache use cases and server impact

  • Database query and object caching
  • Sessions, rate limits, and leaderboards
  • Low-latency ephemeral coordination and counters

Replaces self-managed cache nodes and much replication or failover work, but applications must tolerate cache misses, stale entries, eviction, reconnects, and source-of-truth load.

Official implementation resources

Commonly paired AWS services