Posts by Ian
In this tutorial, we’re going to use Digital Ocean’s pre-build LEMP stack image to deploy a simple Laravel application and demonstrate how to use Memcache to improve application performance. (LEMP is Linux + Nginx + MySQL + PHP.)
A lot of the customer support queries we get at MemCachier are about client timeouts. It’s unusual for these to be due to problems with our infrastructure – we have a sensitive monitoring system that alerts us quickly when there are problems with the machines we use to host MemCachier caches. The timeouts that clients see are most often the result of transient network glitches and problems with client libraries. In this article, we’re going to try to explain a little of what’s going on.
In this tutorial we’re going to look a little beyond the usual “getting started” Django tutorials to look at some of the things you might want to do to deploy applications to production.
As part of the infrastructure improvements that we started in June, we’re going to be merging some of the clusters of EC2 instances that host MemCachier caches, starting in the next couple of weeks. This will not affect all customer caches, and the impact during the merge process will be minimal, but we wanted to be up-front about the fact that this is happening.
In this article, we’ll describe some of the performance impacts of the AWS infrastructure migration we performed recently.
In April, we announced our plan to migrate all of our Amazon Web Services (AWS) clusters to new VPC-based infrastructure on Elastic Cloud Compute. As we wrapped that up this past month, we documented the process to migrate a large multi-tenant, distributed cache service online as well as some lessons learned.
The AWS infrastructure that MemCachier uses for direct sign-up and Heroku customers evolves over time. Amazon releases new EC2 instance types and new network infrastructure features on a regular basis. In order to exploit these new features, MemCachier occasionally needs to migrate caches to new infrastructure. We are planning to migrate all of our clusters to new AWS infrastructure over the course of the next few weeks, starting with development caches and production caches in less-used AWS regions next week. There is likely to be some limited impact on cache performance during the migration process, particularly as we retire existing EC2 instances in favor of new ones.
We have recently added some additional features to MemCachier. In brief, you can now have multiple sets of credentials for a cache, can rotate credentials, and can restrict some capabilities on a per-credential basis. These features are all controlled from the Credentials panel of the MemCachier dashboard for your cache: