MemCachier Blog

Announcements, New Features, and How Tos

MagLev, our new consistent hashing scheme

A key feature that MemCachier offers its clients is the ability to use multiple proxy servers to access their cache. This is important because most issues that clients experience are related to network delays or general connectivity. In such cases a memcached client can fall back to a different proxy and still have access to the entire cache.

AWS Infrastructure Migration: Results

In this article, we’ll describe some of the performance impacts of the AWS infrastructure migration we performed recently.

How we live migrated a 150 node cache

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.

MemCachier Launches on Manifold

We’ve recently launched MemCachier on Manifold! A new company that aims to bring the developer app-store to everyone, rather than have it tied to a single specific PaaS player.

AWS Infrastructure Migration

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.

Revamped Status Page

We are happy to announce some wide-ranging improvements to our status page. While it looks the same on the surface, it has been rewritten from scratch and is now much more tightly integrated with our monitoring infrastructure. For our customers, this has three main consequences.

New Security Features

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:

Flush Command Logging for Heroku

We are happy to announce a new feature for our Heroku customers. In the past we have had several requests from customer who wanted to know why their caches had been flushed. To help our clients find out how a flush command came about we now push a log message to the Heroku log whenever a cache is flushed.

ASCII Protocol Support

We’re happy to announce the general availability of a new feature on MemCachier, the ability to connect to our servers using the memcache ASCII protocol! Our official documentation covers it here.

New Analytics Dashboard and Cache Migration

We are happy to announce a new design for the analytics dashboard and the ability to move your cache from one cluster to another in emergencies.