Today’s guest blogger Rahul Pathak, a Senior Product Manager on the AWS Database Team. Rahul has some news to share.

— Jeff;

Amazon ElastiCache is now available in two additional Regions: US West (Oregon) and South America (Sao Paulo). Caching systems perform best when they are right next to your application servers, so were excited to now have ElastiCache available in all AWS Regions.

In conjunction with this, we’re also adding new CloudFormation templates to allow you to set up complete, cache-enabled application stacks in both these Regions, quickly and predictably.

ElastiCache improves the performance of your applications by retrieving frequently used data from a fast, in-memory cache instead of relying entirely on disk-based databases. The service is ideal for increasing throughput for read-heavy workloads and its also used in compute intensive scenarios where you can speed up application performance by storing intermediate results in the cache.

If you already run Memcached in EC2, transitioning to ElastiCache is as simple as creating a cache cluster and updating your application configuration with the address of your new cache nodes. You can get more details and instructions in our “How Do I Migrate” FAQ.

If you’re new to caching, Memcached, and ElastiCache, Jeff wrote an excellent overview when we launched the service in August 2011 that will tell you all you need to get started. In addition, you’ll also find useful information in the recorded version of our “Turbo-charge Your Apps Using Amazon ElastiCache” webinar:

When running ElastiCache in a production environment keep in mind that more nodes give you higher availability while larger nodes ensure that more data can be kept in cache at any point in time. Fortunately, ElastiCache makes it easy to experiment with different configurations quickly and cost-effectively so you can find the setup that best meets your requirements and budget.

You can get started with Amazon ElastiCache by logging in to the AWS Management Console and creating a cache cluster in a matter of minutes.

— Rahul