Google LLC is making life easier for people using the open-source Memcached in-memory data store, announcing today a new, fully managed service that reduces the burden of infrastructure management and maintenance.

Memcached is a popular in-memory data store that’s used to accelerate workloads such as application programming interface rate limiting, gaming leaderboards, session stores, streaming analytics and threat detection. It’s an essential component of high-performance applications, helping to provide low latency and scale for millions of transactions, Google said.

In a blog post acknowledging the popularity of Memcached, Google Product Manager Gopal Ashok announced a new service called Memorystore for Memcached. He explained that the service is used to cache applications’ most frequently used data for fast access by saving it to a server’s memory instead of slower secondary storage as traditional systems do, thereby speeding response times. The service also helps automate complex tasks such as the provisioning, scaling, failover and monitoring of applications.

“Memcached offers a simple but powerful in-memory key value store and is popular as a front-end cache for databases,” Ashok wrote. “Using Memcached as a front-end store not only provides an in-memory caching layer for faster query processing, but it can also help save costs by reducing the load on your back-end databases.”

The blog post goes on to outline several benefits of Memorystore for Memcached, including the ability to migrate applications built atop the data store to Google Cloud without making any changes to their code base. The service is fully managed, which means tasks such as deploying, monitoring, patching scaling and managing node configurations are all taken care of.

The service also comes with an auto-discovery protocol that enables users to adapt to changes programmatically, drastically reducing the manageability overhead and code complexity, Ashok said.

“The scaling feature of Memorystore for Memcached, along with detailed open source Memcached monitoring metrics, allows you to scale your instance up and down easily to optimize for your cache-hit ratio and price,” he added. “With Memorystore for Memcached, you can scale your cluster up to 5 TB per instance.”

Ashok said Memorystore for Memcached is available now in beta, and can be accessed via applications running on services such as Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, App Engine Flex, App Engine Standard and Cloud Functions. He added that the service is available in “major regions” across the U.S., Asia and Europe, and will be available globally soon.

Photo: Spiros Vathis/Flickr