Amazon ElastiCache vs Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

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Amazon ElastiCache vs Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL: What are the differences?

Introduction

Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL are both managed database services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). While they serve similar purposes, there are key differences between the two. This article aims to provide a comparison of Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL.

  1. Deployment of Caching vs Relational Database: Amazon ElastiCache is primarily designed for caching purposes, enabling you to deploy an in-memory cache service such as Redis or Memcached. On the other hand, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL is a fully managed relational database service, allowing you to deploy and manage PostgreSQL databases.

  2. Data Structure: Key-Value store vs Relational Database: Amazon ElastiCache is optimized for key-value data, making it suitable for caching scenarios where simple key-value lookups are required. In contrast, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL provides a relational database management system that supports a rich set of SQL features and complex data structures.

  3. Scaling: Horizontal Scaling vs Vertical Scaling: With Amazon ElastiCache, horizontal scaling is the primary method of scaling. The cache nodes can be added or removed to handle varying workload demands. On the other hand, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL allows both horizontal and vertical scaling. You can horizontally scale by adding read replicas and vertically scale by increasing the compute and storage capacity of the database instance.

  4. Replication and High Availability: Amazon ElastiCache provides automatic replication and high availability for caching data, allowing you to easily recover from failures. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL also supports replication and high availability through features like Multi-AZ (Availability Zone) deployments and read replicas. This ensures data durability and availability.

  5. Data Persistence: Volatile vs Durable: Amazon ElastiCache is designed to be an in-memory cache, which means the data stored in the cache is volatile. In contrast, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL provides durable storage for your data, ensuring data persistence even in the event of failures or restarts.

  6. Backup and Restore: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL offers automated backup and restore features, allowing you to easily create backups, restore to a point-in-time, and recover data in case of data loss or corruption. Amazon ElastiCache does not provide native backup and restore functionality since it is intended for caching purposes rather than long-term data storage.

In Summary, Amazon ElastiCache is a caching service optimized for key-value data with horizontal scaling, while Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL is a managed relational database service with support for complex data structures, vertical and horizontal scaling, as well as backup and restore capabilities.

Advice on Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

Considering moving part of our PostgreSQL database infrastructure to the cloud, however, not quite sure between AWS, Heroku, Azure and Google cloud. Things to consider: The main reason is for backing up and centralize all our data in the cloud. With that in mind the main elements are: -Pricing for storage. -Small team. -No need for high throughput. -Support for docker swarm and Kubernetes.

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Replies (2)
David Weinberg

Good balance between easy to manage, pricing, docs and features.

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Max Musing
Founder & CEO at BaseDash · | 1 upvotes · 48.5K views

DigitalOcean's offering is pretty solid. Easy to scale, great UI, automatic daily backups, decent pricing.

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Pros of Amazon ElastiCache
Pros of Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL
  • 58
    Redis
  • 32
    High-performance
  • 26
    Backed by amazon
  • 21
    Memcached
  • 14
    Elastic
  • 25
    Easy setup, backup, monitoring
  • 13
    Geospatial support
  • 2
    Master-master replication using Multi-AZ instance

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What is Amazon ElastiCache?

ElastiCache improves the performance of web applications by allowing you to retrieve information from fast, managed, in-memory caches, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases. ElastiCache supports Memcached and Redis.

What is Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL?

Amazon RDS manages complex and time-consuming administrative tasks such as PostgreSQL software installation and upgrades, storage management, replication for high availability and back-ups for disaster recovery. With just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, you can deploy a PostgreSQL database with automatically configured database parameters for optimal performance. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database instances can be provisioned with either standard storage or Provisioned IOPS storage. Once provisioned, you can scale from 10GB to 3TB of storage and from 1,000 IOPS to 30,000 IOPS.

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What companies use Amazon ElastiCache?
What companies use Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL?
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What are some alternatives to Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL?
Redis
Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams.
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of storing data and searching it in near real time. Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash are the Elastic Stack (sometimes called the ELK Stack).
Memcached
Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.
Azure Redis Cache
It perfectly complements Azure database services such as Cosmos DB. It provides a cost-effective solution to scale read and write throughput of your data tier. Store and share database query results, session states, static contents, and more using a common cache-aside pattern.
Amazon DynamoDB
With it , you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available distributed database cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.
See all alternatives