Availability and pricing

Cloud	Version	Software price	Last build
AWS Marketplace EC2 AMI · all commercial regions	1.6.45	$0.05/hr Recommended instance: t3.medium · 5-day free trial	2026-08-31	Listing ↗
Azure Marketplace VM image · plan payg-gen2 · Gen2	1.6.45	$0.028/vCPU/hr Recommended VM: Standard_D2s_v3	2026-09-01	Listing ↗

Software price only; cloud infrastructure is billed separately by the provider. Prices in USD.

Image facts

Base OS	Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
Hardening	CIS Level 1, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (tailored)
License	BSD-3-Clause
Upstream	Memcached
Machine-readable	product.json · catalog.json

What is Memcached

Memcached is a high-performance, distributed in-memory object caching system, implemented as a single multithreaded C daemon built on libevent. It stores arbitrary key-value pairs in RAM to take load off databases and APIs, with a slab allocator, LRU eviction, per-key TTL expiry, atomic increment/decrement and compare-and-swap, and text, binary and meta protocols. Applications shard transparently across nodes using consistent hashing in the client, with mature client libraries for PHP, Python, Java, Node.js, Go, Ruby and most other languages. It is the battle-tested caching layer behind many of the largest web platforms. Memcached is in-memory only with no persistence by design - the cache is rebuilt by the application after a restart. BSD-3-Clause license, no vendor lock-in.

What the Lynxroute image adds

Security hardening:

SASL authentication required at first boot - a unique random credential is generated, not a default or empty password
Bound to the private interface and loopback only - never 0.0.0.0, never exposed to the internet
UDP disabled (-U 0) - closes the well-known Memcached DDoS amplification vector
Memory cap sized to the instance automatically at first boot
UFW firewall - SSH on 22 only; port 11211 governed by your Security Group
fail2ban, AppArmor
CVE scan - every image is scanned for vulnerabilities before release

OS hardening (CIS Level 1):

CIS Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Level 1 benchmark applied via ansible-lockdown
auditd, SSH hardening, Kernel hardening, IMDSv2 enforced

Compliance artifacts:

SBOM - CycloneDX 1.6 at /etc/lynxroute/sbom.json
CIS Conformance Report at /etc/lynxroute/cis-report.html
CIS Tailored Profile at /usr/share/doc/lynxroute/CIS_TAILORED_PROFILE.md

Deploy

Launch in one command

Credentials are generated at first boot and written to /root/memcached-credentials.txt.

AWS CLIAzure CLI

# subscribe once on the AWS Marketplace listing, then:
aws ec2 run-instances \
  --image-id resolve:ssm:/aws/service/marketplace/prod-dszvdqizsxdqe/latest \
  --instance-type t3.medium --key-name my-key --security-group-ids sg-xxxxxxxx

# accept the plan terms once, then:
az vm image terms accept --publisher lynxroute --offer memcached --plan payg-gen2
az vm create -g my-rg -n memcached --size Standard_D2s_v3 \
  --image lynxroute:memcached:payg-gen2:latest --admin-username azureuser --generate-ssh-keys

Release notes

Latest release

The most recent release with notes; the full release history is in product.json.

Memcached v1.6.45

AWS · 2026-08-31Azure · 2026-09-01

Same upstream version (AWS rejects a duplicate VersionTitle, hence the "v"). Log rotation no longer silently stops Memcached logging: the unit writes via StandardOutput=append:, so systemd owns the fd and the previous `create` rotation left the service writing into the old renamed file while the live log stayed empty. Now uses copytruncate.
Rebuilt on the current CIS Level 1 hardened Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base.