Tip : Deliver your content from the edge of your architecture stack.
Imagine you have online application with Multi-tiered architecture comprising of Security Tier, Load Balancing Tier, Web tier, Application tier and Caching tier etc. Information has to travel through all these tiers to hit the caching layer and deliver the response back many times. This might take couple of hundred's of milliseconds sometimes depending upon the processing needs and network latency in the AWS infra . This overall latency might not be acceptable for certain use cases which needs sub second content delivery to the end users.
Instead of delivering your frequently accessed contents from the deep caching tier, You can re-architect your stack a little and try to deliver content from entry point itself. Solutions like Varnish, aiCache and NetScaler specialize in this caching and acceleration techniques and are widely used in AWS infra by architects. AMIs of these products are available on the AWS marketplace and many customers have already put them on production use. These products have the capability to cache/compress pages, objects, URL etc and by placing them at the entry of your architecture you will reduce the latency, save precious back end compute cycles and save costs by reducing the instance capacity needed at the backend. In case you use NetScaler Amazon EC2 it comes with sophisticated Load balancing algorithms as well, this way you can cut an extra LB tier and merge both cache+LB together to achieve high performance at low latency. Since these products are at the entry and have heavy dependency on bandwidth and memory, it is recommended to use EC2 instances with High IO and Memory capacity for these products.
This architecture implementation is a useful technique and can be widely adopted on segments like online newspapers/news, blogs ,content management systems, online classifieds use cases etc in AWS, which has lots of static content that does not change quite frequently and can be delivered again and again from the page cache-web accelerators tiers itself.
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