Amazon ElastiCache vs twemproxy: What are the differences?

Amazon ElastiCache: Deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud. 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; twemproxy: A fast, light-weight proxy for memcached and redis, by Twitter. twemproxy (pronounced "two-em-proxy"), aka nutcracker is a fast and lightweight proxy for memcached and redis protocol. It was built primarily to reduce the number of connections to the caching servers on the backend. This, together with protocol pipelining and sharding enables you to horizontally scale your distributed caching architecture.

Amazon ElastiCache can be classified as a tool in the "Managed Memcache" category, while twemproxy is grouped under "Memcached Tools".

Some of the features offered by Amazon ElastiCache are:

• Support for two engines: Memcached and Redis
• Ease of management via the AWS Management Console. With a few clicks you can configure and launch instances for the engine you wish to use.
• Compatibility with the specific engine protocol. This means most of the client libraries will work with the respective engines they were built for - no additional changes or tweaking required.

On the other hand, twemproxy provides the following key features:

• Fast.
• Lightweight.
• Maintains persistent server connections.

twemproxy is an open source tool with 9.14K GitHub stars and 1.67K GitHub forks. Here's a link to twemproxy's open source repository on GitHub.