Memcached and Web Cache Blog

Once someone starts using memcached, they tend to quickly find themselves in the state of: "my database servers overload and my site goes down if the memcached stops working". This isn't really surprising, quite often memcached was thrown into the stack because the database servers are melting under the load of the growing site.

But then they face an issue that is, as mathematicians and programmers like to call it, "interesting".

"How do I add more capacity without an outage?"

Just a few years ago, when big sites like Facebook or Netflix were building out their delivery networks to customers, they would build data centers near major internet hubs. That meant setting up shop in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, and New York, as well as at international hubs like London, Madrid, and Tokyo. As long as the data center was close to major population centers, people could get service pretty rapidly.

We’re particularly excited to announce today's roll out of the first Memcached-as-a-Service offering to Blue Box Group clients. We first partnered with Blue Box Group in May of last year to create such an offering specific to running and managing Rail applications in the cloud, with a private beta launched shortly thereafter. Now it's time to bring this joint MaaS solution to everyone using Blue Box Group's hosting services.

Whether you like the term "Web 2.0" or not, everything it implies — the Web as a platform for user-generated content, information sharing, collaboration — would not be possible without one cornerstone technology: Memcached.

Think about it.

Memcached was released in October 2003 by Djanga Interactive to scale LiveJournal. Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle presented their definition of Web 2.0 at the first Web 2.0 conference a year later (their definition is published here).