Caching as a Best Practice for Microservices-Based Applications

Microservices-based applications have been a game changer. This approach to building applications comes with its own set of tools, technologies and best practices. This paper is focused on how in-memory caching, like Amazon ElastiCache, has an important role in microservices-based applications.

The topics covered in this paper include:
• Microservices-based applications have compelling advantages that are now indispensable. They are a great fit for containerization and for use with AWS cloud infrastructure and container orchestration systems like Kubernetes.
• Microservices introduce network latency. For the overall responsetime of the application to be acceptable, other areas of the architecture need to be optimized for performance, placing demands on the latency of each microservice.
• The key to managing reduced microservice latency budgets is to reduce reliance on a backend, high-latency database as much as possible.
• The importance of high availability and how ElastiCache supports this.
• How storing a user’s session data in ElastiCache enhances the user’s experience.
• How ElastiCache can be used as a message broker or an event store for inter-microservice communications.

In this whitepaper, we examine the role of the data layer, and how the use of Amazon ElastiCache as an in-memory cache can be a critical infrastructure component in support of microservices architectures.