AWS ElastiCache: Encryption — Benchmarks

AWS ElastiCache supports At-Rest and In-Transit Encryption. It is quite handy for keeping the data secure. The process to enable the encryption can be found here. We are going to benchmark the different combinations of encryption and look at the time, CPU and memory utilization.

We will use the following command to benchmark the time taken for each case. It runs 10000 random SET/GET/INCR commands.

redis-benchmark -t set -r 10000 -n 10000 -h <redis-host>

And for CPU & Memory utilization we can use CloudWatch metrics.

No Encryption

10000 requests completed in 61.46 seconds
  50 parallel clients
  3 bytes payload
  keep alive: 1

0.01% <= 265 milliseconds
0.02% <= 266 milliseconds
0.06% <= 267 milliseconds
0.10% <= 268 milliseconds
0.20% <= 269 milliseconds
...
99.96% <= 627 milliseconds
99.97% <= 931 milliseconds
99.98% <= 1046 milliseconds
99.99% <= 1347 milliseconds
100.00% <= 1364 milliseconds
162.72 requests per second

At-Rest Encryption

10000 requests completed in 62.86 seconds
  50 parallel clients
  3 bytes payload
  keep alive: 1
0.01% <= 245 milliseconds
0.02% <= 246 milliseconds
0.03% <= 247 milliseconds
0.06% <= 248 milliseconds
0.10% <= 250 milliseconds
...
99.96% <= 746 milliseconds
99.97% <= 1183 milliseconds
99.98% <= 1224 milliseconds
99.99% <= 1268 milliseconds
100.00% <= 1282 milliseconds
159.09 requests

At-Rest & In-Transit Encryption (With Password)

10000 requests completed in 72.93 seconds
  50 parallel clients
  3 bytes payload
  keep alive: 1
  multi-thread: no
0.01% <= 300 milliseconds
0.04% <= 302 milliseconds
0.10% <= 303 milliseconds
0.17% <= 304 milliseconds
0.27% <= 305 milliseconds
...
99.50% <= 1564 milliseconds
99.51% <= 1647 milliseconds
99.72% <= 1648 milliseconds
100.00% <= 1648 milliseconds
137.13 requests per second

In-Transit Encryption (Without Password)

10000 requests completed in 70.65 seconds
  50 parallel clients
  3 bytes payload
  keep alive: 1
  multi-thread: no
0.01% <= 302 milliseconds
0.05% <= 303 milliseconds
0.08% <= 304 milliseconds
0.23% <= 305 milliseconds
0.36% <= 306 milliseconds
...
99.95% <= 1980 milliseconds
99.96% <= 1985 milliseconds
99.97% <= 2001 milliseconds
99.98% <= 2005 milliseconds
100.00% <= 2034 milliseconds
141.55 requests per second