We are excited to share three announcements today that give you more flexibility and lower costs when deploying Amazon ElastiCache, a fully managed, in-memory, Memcached-compatible caching service.

Amazon ElastiCache availability in Sydney. Starting today, customers can use Amazon ElastiCache clusters for their scale-out caching needs in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region. Sydney joins Singapore and Tokyo as the third Region in Asia Pacific and as the ninth Region worldwide. Global expansion of enhanced (M3) cache nodes. The enhanced (M3) cache nodes, built on the next generation AWS infrastructure, are now available in all regions except AWS GovCloud. Reduced cache node pricing. We have reduced prices of M1 cache nodes in the US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), and South America (São Paulo) Regions. As a result, the m1.small cache node is now 19% cheaper in these regions. In addition, we reduced prices for M2, M3 and C1 cache nodes in the South America (São Paulo) region.

Amazon ElastiCache improves the performance of your web applications by retrieving data from a fast, in-memory cache instead of relying entirely on disk-based storage. Unlike other caching mechanisms, Amazon ElastiCache is fully managed so you don’t have to worry about maintaining your own caching infrastructure. In addition, it is Memcached-compatible, so existing Memcached-enabled applications should work with ElastiCache without any code changes.

To learn more about the service, please see our recent presentation from the first AWS re:Invent Conference, and review the Getting Started Guide. You can launch a cache cluster with a few clicks using the AWS Management Console or a few simple API calls. For more information about the new cache node types and prices, please visit the Amazon ElastiCache page.