hands-on lab

Create your first Amazon ElastiCache Cluster

Beginner
1h
7,414
4.5/5
Get guided in a real environmentPractice with a step-by-step scenario in a real, provisioned environment.
Learn and validateUse validations to check your solutions every step of the way.
See resultsTrack your knowledge and monitor your progress.
Lab description

Learn how to create and manage a Memcached cluster using Amazon ElastiCache 

ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale a distributed in-memory cache environment in the cloud. You can choose from Memcached or Redis protocol-compliant cache engine software, and let ElastiCache perform software upgrades and patch management for you automatically.

Existing applications that use Memcached or Redis can use ElastiCache with almost no modification and, thanks to the ElastiCache Auto Discovery feature, they will identify all of the cluster nodes and connect to them, rather than having to maintain a list of available hostnames and port numbers.

This Lab experience will guide you during the creation, and the scale-up and down operations, of your first Elasticache cluster.

Updates

December 15th, 2023 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

May 23rd, 2022 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

March 30th, 2022 - Updated permissions for metric visualization

January 6th, 2022 - Updated command for downloading demonstration PHP client script

December 22nd, 2021 - Updated instructions to utilize EC2 instance connect

May 19th, 2021 - Updated all instructions and screenshots

February 24th, 2020 - Simplified the instructions for downloading the ElastiCache PHP client onto the EC2 instance by avoiding SCP

February 9th, 2020 - Resolved an issue causing the first check to erroneously fail in some cases

January 10th, 2019 - Added a validation Lab Step to check the work you perform in the Lab

July 19th, 2018 - Updated screenshots to match the new ElastiCache experience and added comments related to ElastiCache and Amazon Linux 2

May 14th, 2018 - Updated improved instruction clarity for connecting to the EC2 instance

About the author
Avatar
Antonio Angelino
Senior DevOps Engineer
Students
26,703
Labs
4
Courses
1

Antonio is an IT Manager and a software and infrastructure Engineer with 15 years of experience in designing, implementing and deploying complex webapps.

He has a deep knowledge of the IEEE Software and Systems Engineering Standards and of several programming languages (Python, PHP, Java, Scala, JS).

Antonio has also been using and designing cloud infrastructures for five years, using both public and private cloud services (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, Openstack and Vmware vSphere).

During his past working experiences, he designed and managed large web clusters, also developing a service orchestrator for providing automatic scaling, self-healing and a Disaster Recovery Strategy.

Antonio is currently the Labs Product Manager and a Senior DevOps Engineer at Cloud Academy; his main goal is providing the best learn-by-doing experience possible taking care of the Cloud Academy Labs platform.

Covered topics
Lab steps
Logging In to the Amazon Web Services Console
Create a Cache Subnet Group
Create a Memcached cluster using AWS Elasticache
Configure the Security Group for allowing inbound traffic
Connecting to the Virtual Machine using EC2 Instance Connect
Install ElastiCache Memcached extension for PHP
Connect to ElastiCache using PHP
Destroy an ElastiCache cluster