This page describes best practices for initially sizing and configuring your instance.
For instance creation instructions, see Creating and managing Memcached instances.
For details on Memcached instance settings, see Instance and node properties.
Number of nodes
You should choose an appropriate number of nodes for the level of fail-proofing you want. The greater the number of nodes, the less data lost should an individual node fail. We recommend that you use 3 nodes for small instances, 10 nodes for medium sized instances, and 20 nodes for large instances. 20 nodes is the maximum number of nodes you can provision for a single instance.
Instance and node size
In order to choose your initial instance size, you should first estimate how much data your application will require. Estimate the average key size and the number of keys you expect your application to write. This number can change, but estimating the size of your data is a good start for choosing instance size. Then, divide the total instance size by the number of nodes you want to provision.
Number of vCPUs/cores
Your vCPU allocation depends on your preference for price vs. speed. More vCPUs provide more processing power, up to a point. 4 vCPUs per node are sufficient for most use cases.
The number of vCPUs you choose impacts the amount of memory per node you must provision. See the note in Instance and node size for more details.
Network options
Memorystore for Memcached uses VPC networking by default and is compatible with Shared VPC, should you or your organization wish to use Shared VPC. You must establish a private services access for a network before you can create a Memcached instance with that network. See Networking for more details.