Memcached Instances on the Linode LAN

UPDATE: The services listed in this posted are now available at https://linsides.com.

I’ve decided to offer private memcached instances on the Linode private network. Memcached is a very fast, in-memory object cache, used by many websites to reduce load on their database. It’s commonly run on several servers on the same LAN, and most memcached clients use a hashing system to distribute objects across multiple instances.

One major feature of Linode’s VPS service is the private network that allows Linodes in the same datacenter to communicate with each other without touching your bandwidth quota (another bonus is that’s _very_ fast, average RTT’s are around 0.2ms for me).

I personally use memcached on a few Linodes in order to provide caching for a number of sites I run (including this humble blog). I’ve found it to be a little cumbersome managing multiple instances across multiple servers, so I developed a simple dashboard to make my life easier. I figured if I had a need for easily managed memcached instances, maybe other folks do as well, so I’ve decided to open it up to let some folks try it out, with the intention of eventually selling it as a service.

Here’s an obligatory screenshot from the dashboard:

Right now feature set is pretty basic. In the future I’d like to add a number of features including the ability to schedule a cache flush on a repeating basis, a simple interface to check the value of a key, and perhaps even an API for managing instances.

So, if you’re a Linode user (Newark only for now), and feel like adding another memcached instance or two to your cache, fill out this form and I’ll get you set up with a beta account.