---
title: "How is Memcached architected differently in Cloud Next?"
date: "2025-02-04T14:01:44+00:00"
summary: "Cloud Next's Memcached: Highly available, scalable, and performant for all customers. Uses mcrouter for improved resilience."
image:
type: "article"
url: "/acquia-cloud-platform/help/60926-how-memcached-architected-differently-cloud-next"
id: "5c281601-8db8-4a54-b7c4-b7ca3c93c9f9"
---

### Cloud Classic

Memcached runs across all available web nodes with 64 MB of memory allocated to each infrastructure. This isolates a relatively small amount of system memory, pulling it away from PHP, cron, and other application-layer services for the exclusive use of Memcached.

Some customers on the Cloud Classic infrastructure also invested in _dedicated Memcache_ capacity, where some infrastructure was set aside for the exclusive use of Memcached so that two or more nodes could allocate nearly all of their available memory to Memcache. This configuration was typically only available to top-tier accounts and for production environments.

### Cloud Next

The Memcache service is rearchitected to be highly available and can serve requests from applications any time. Data in Memcache might be split across multiple Memcache servers to ensure high availability and scalability for your applications. For example, Acquia might provision two servers each of 6 GB size for a customer who has 12 GB of Memcache allocation. This not only results in improved performance but also expands access to a more performant Memcached configuration to all customers by default. Individual Memcache servers in an environment might restart sometimes due to regular maintenance and customer actions in Cloud Platform. For environments running in Cloud Next, Drupal pods connect to Memcached pods through a relay point running [mcrouter](https://engineering.fb.com/2014/09/15/web/introducing-mcrouter-a-memcached-protocol-router-for-scaling-memcached-deployments/) for improved performance and resiliency. Owing to this optimization, the `[mcstat]` command does not function during SSH sessions and the [Memcache](https://www.drupal.org/project/memcache/issues/3192907) module. After using SSH to access an environment, use `acquia-memcache stats` to access Memcached data.

The Cloud Platform team is actively researching potential mid-term solutions to both limitations to improve customer visibility into the health and performance of Memcached on your environments.