Memcached

Choosing engine Redis: rich data types, persistence, clustering, scripts; good for queues/rate limits. Memcached: simple KV, pure in-memory, fast; great for stateless caches. Design Namespaced keys, versioned; TTL with jitter; avoid giant values. Pick eviction (LRU/LFU); monitor hit rate and evictions. Stampede control: locks/SETNX, stale-while-revalidate, per-key backoff. Ops Pooling + timeouts; alert on latency, evictions, memory fragmentation. For Redis, persistence config (AOF/RDB) matched to durability needs; replicas for HA. For Memcached, spread slabs; watch for evictions of hot slabs. Checklist Engine chosen per use case; durability/HA decided. TTLs + jitter; stampede protection in place. Metrics for hit/miss/evictions/latency.