Frequently Asked Questions

Find answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about Momento services. Can't find an answer you're looking for? Reach out on Discord or contact us and we'll help you out.

Our Approach to Serverless

What does serverless really mean?

The heart of serverless is to power innovation and developer productivity by lowering barriers to entry like cost, complexity, and time-to-market. It promises simplicity, speed to get started, instant scalability, and best practices by default. According to our litmus test, a service is serverless if it checks all of the following:

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1. Nothing to provision, nothing to manage

2. Usage-based pricing with no minimums

3. Ready with a single API call

4. No planned downtime

5. No instances

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This is the standard to which we hold all of our services. It's why our driving mantra is "Believe in serverless". Read more about the true definition of serverless on our blog about it.

Does Momento Cache only work with serverless applications?

No! one of the beautiful things about the serverless model is modularity! Momento Cache supports serverless and serverfull applications.

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Example use cases: Web applications, game development, data processing, IoT(internet of things), chatbots, instant messaging, mobile apps, relational databases, legacy applications, and more.

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If you have a specific use case in mind that could work with one of Momento's services, reach out!

Momento Services

What is Momento Cache and how do I get started?

Momento Cache is the first truly serverless caching service. It provides instant elasticity, scale-to-zero capability, and lightning-fast performance. Store data in a centralized, remote cache with automatic data expiration. With Momento Cache, you grab the SDK, input a few lines into your code, and you're off and running.

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You can create a cache in Momento Console–or use your API token to read and write data using an SDK. Just pick a language from our growing list, write a few lines of code, and go.

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Check out this quick tour of Momento Console!

What is Momento Topics and how do I get started?

Momento Topics is a serverless pub/sub (publish/subscribe) messaging service that allows for real-time communication between parts of a distributed system. It's an event messaging system that allows your apps to subscribe to topics to receive messages from publishers. Because Momento Topics is serverless, there is no infrastructure to maintain. No need to create and manage topics beforehand. You can publish to any topic on the fly!

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To read more about getting started with Momento Topics, read our docs–and if you'd like to test it out, try out our sandbox demo!

What type of data can I store in a cache?

All data stored in Momento Cache can be provided as a string or byte array. Check out the API reference in Docs for more details, but here's a quick summary.

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1. Scalar values: simple string/byte arrays

2. Dictionary: Key/value object storage allowing you to fetch all or subset of data with a single call

3. Set: An array of unique elements

4. Sorted Set: A score-based array of strings that automatically sorts by score

5. List: An ordered array of strings

What programming languages do you support?

We currently have SDKs for the following languages: Go, Java, Node.js, Python, .NET, Rust, PHP, Ruby, and Elixir. Check out each repo for detailed instructions and usage examples. If there's a specific language you want us to support, let us know!

What cloud providers and regions do you support?

Momento is a cloud-agnostic offering, but if you want the lowest latencies and fastest response times possible, you should use the region closest to where your code is running.

• AWS [us-west-2, us-east-1, eu-west-1, ap-south-1, ap-northeast-1]

• GCP [us-central1, us-east4]

• Azure (Coming Soon)

• If you don't see a region you need, let us know. We're always prioritizing new regions based on user demand!

Evaluating Momento

How is Momento priced?

Momento's pricing is simple. Your first 5GB transferred per month is free! After that you only pay $0.50 per GB. Check out our pricing page for more information–and reference some pricing examples in this blog: Complicated pricing is not serverless.

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No paying for idle capacity. No charges for data storage. You only pay for the data transferred into and out of Momento. That's it!

How does Momento work with DynamoDB?

We’ve got a whole page dedicated to showing how we enhance DynamoDB! Momento Cache pairs well with DynamoDB by providing expedited access for reads that can accommodate data staleness. It can also aid in preventing potential hot key problems.

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‍Click here to learn how to improve hit rates by using DynamoDB Streams and Momento Cache together. And DynamoDB isn’t the only Amazon service we attach to. Learn more about how we enhance products across the AWS ecosystem here.

What if I'm already using Redis?

No worries! When you're ready to upgrade to Momento, we have drop-in replacement clients so you don’t have to refactor your code. Just change your client library to the compatibility client, change the connection information, and the core of your code stays the same.

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Learn more about making the switch from Redis to Momento on our dedicated page about exactly that—and if you want a quick overview of how Redis and Momento compare to one another, read this blog.

How is Momento Cache different than DAX?

Momento Cache is a serverless, read-aside cache that scales automatically and maintains high availability for DynamoDB. In contrast, DAX is a managed, cluster-based solution that requires manual scaling and can be disruptive to application traffic. Although DAX promises API compatibility with DynamoDB, it falls short in practice, while Momento Cache is easy to integrate using middleware.

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Learn more how a serverfull cache can hold your database back.

How does Momento Cache differ from other products in the industry?

There are many great storage solutions in the industry today, but Momento Cache is a full-fledged serverless service that offers hands-free management of storage technologies. For an example comparison, check out this article that runs through the key differences between Momento Cache and Redis—and explore our page dedicated to using Momento as a Redis replacement!

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We offer the caching benefits you know and love, but we come with the simplicity of usage-based pricing, no infrastructure management, no configuration, and security best practices out of the box.

Is Momento GDPR Compliant?

Momento follows a similar data locality model to cloud providers like AWS. The service is operated independently by cloud provider region. No customer data is replicated between regions. Persisted data, data in memory, and data in transit are all encrypted. Data in Momento Cache has a max 24 hour time-to-live (TTL) by default. These features and functionalities will help you in meet GDPR compliance requirements.

Once we had the new Momento provider, we were able to quickly swap Momento across multiple workflows and assess the performance and scale impact. Momento outperformed ElastiCache on our workflows by 15% on latencies and is able to automatically handle approximately 12X our current peak loads, without wasteful overprovisioned infrastructure or distracting scaling efforts from our engineers.

Edwin Rivera

Principal Architect, CBS Interactive

We have implemented Momento Serverless Cache to store a large volume of small objects. Momento was fast and easy to deploy, boosted the performance of our workload, and increased our developer productivity by eliminating operational tasks. Next up we are implementing Momento to accelerate our ML workflows.

TQ

CTO, Wyze Labs

It was a whirlwind from dev to prod, and Momento blew us away! Faster, scalable, and half the price of our old cache fleet—all integrated in just one week.

Cornelle Janse van Rensburg

Lead Engineer, Saturn

Before Momento, surges of sudden connections and Redis cold starts blocked our migration to a serverless architecture. Momento solved this—fast! It worked so well, we're adopting it for future caching projects.

Tom Delorenzi

CTO, ZigZaGame

Thanks to Momento, we finally have a cache built for the cloud. No more instance-based, self-hosted infrastructure. You get a dynamic cache with pay-per-use pricing, unparalleled performance, and no pre-provisioning of instances.

Alex DeBrie

DynamoDB Expert & AWS Data Hero

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