The objective of this article is to explain why ad server team at GumGum migrated from AWS ElastiCache for Memcahed to AWS DAX as a cache for DynamoDB and how did it benefit us.

What is Caching?

Caching is the process of storing data into a cache. A cache is a temporary storage location where data is kept for later use. It avoids running expensive queries on databases & data stores for same data.

At GumGum, one of our primary data stores for contextual targeting purposes is DynamoDB, which stores ~1.2 billion rows of page data and ~ 50 billion rows of visitor…