ElastiCache mic drop moment

ElastiCache and ValKey just dropped a bunch of new features that are going to make my professional life sooo much better.

Full-text, exact-match, range, and hybrid search are huge.

Basically, this turns a value key store that can primarily be searched by one key into something that more closely matches a relational or document DB, where you can search by multiple fields.

I am curious about the performance implications, but they said it will work with shards and everything.

They also added aggregations. Before, you would extract the individual records, then aggregate them in the application layer. Now you can do Sorts, filters, reduce and group all in ElastiCache.

Again, I am skeptical how this would be performant or, in a sharded environment, even possible, but I will have a darn good time testing and benchmarking it.

Combine these new features with their Vector Index functionality and you could build some really powerful stuff with this.

There is a risk that if you try to be everything to everyone, you will create a bland product that doesn’t do any one thing great.

That is a possibility, but I don’t think that is the case yet. We will see.

I flew through these features in this post, but if you would like a deeper dive into them, let me know and I will do a deeper dive.