Question

A customer relationship management (crm) application is facing user experience issues with users reporting frequent sign-in requests from the application. the application is currently hosted on multiple amazon ec2 instances behind an application load balancer. the engineering team has identified the root cause as unhealthy servers causing session data to be lost. the team would like to implement a distributed in-memory cache-based session management solution. as a solutions architect, which of the following solutions would you recommend?

a. Use DynamoDB for distributed in-memory cache based session management
b. Use Elasticache for distributed in-memory cache based session management
c. Use Application Load Balancer sticky sessions
d. Use RDS for distributed in-memory cache based session management

Answer 1

AWS ElastiCache is the recommended distributed in-memory cache-based session management solution for addressing session data loss in a CRM application. Neither Amazon DynamoDB nor Amazon RDS is suited for this purpose, and while Application Load Balancer sticky sessions offer partial mitigation, they do not handle server failure.

Step-by-step explanation:

For a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application experiencing user experience issues due to frequent sign-in requests and session data loss, the recommended solution is to use a distributed in-memory cache-based session management system. Specifically, AWS ElastiCache is an excellent option for this use case. ElastiCache supports two open-source in-memory caching engines: Redis and Memcached, both of which are well-suited for managing session state. Redis is often preferred for its data persistence and rich data structures, which make it ideal for complex scenarios, whereas Memcached is simpler and may be sufficient for basic session caching needs.

Using Amazon DynamoDB, a NoSQL database service, is not the best choice for in-memory caching because it's primarily used for database storage rather than high-speed caching. Application Load Balancer sticky sessions, also known as session affinity, could partially address the issue by ensuring that a user is consistently directed to the same server, however, this does not solve the problem of server failure and potential session loss. Furthermore, Amazon RDS is a relational database service, not designed for in-memory caching purposes.

Implementing an in-memory caching solution using ElastiCache can significantly improve the user experience by reducing session data loss and unnecessary sign-in prompts, which in turn enhances the overall stability and reliability of the CRM application.