Google has announced the beta of Memorystore for Memcached, which is a new service providing a fully managed in-memory datastore that is compatible with the open-source Memcached protocol. It will join Redis in the Memorystore family that was first launched in 2018.

Gopal Ashok, Google’s product manager for Memorystore, noted in an announcement that Redis continues to remain a popular choice for use cases such as threat detection, API rate limiting, session stores, gaming leaderboards, and stream analytics, while Memcached is usually used as a caching layer for databases and as a session store by developers. With this new service, developers can now scale their clusters up to 5TB of memory per instance.

Developers would be able to take any of their apps that makes use of the protocol and can then migrate them over to Google Cloud and its Memorystore platform as the service is fully compatible with Memcached.

Identifying the right size of a cache remains an intriguing and complicated task but it is argued by Google Cloud that developers would be guided by its detailed metrics to easily scale their instances up and down as required with the purpose of optimizing the service for their specific use cases. The company noted that those metrics are exposed in Cloud Monitoring, Google Cloud’s centralized monitoring dashboard, and the Cloud Console.

Google, as a fully managed service, will be handling all of the routine tasks such as patching and monitoring. Memorystore for Memcached presently can be used for apps that run on Compute Engine, App Engine Standard, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), App Engine Flex, and Cloud Functions.

Similar services are offered by startups like MemCachier and even Amazon with ElastiCache for Memcached. Redis Labs is also offering a fully managed Memcached service that can run on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.