There are many reactions going around to MySQL and Memcached: End of an Era, especially to the statement "it's clear the MySQL+memcached era is passing".
I think that really depends on what you mean by "era" and "passing".
The era of memcached being THE cutting edge technique for getting speed at scale may be "ending", but not because memcached is failing, but because there are additional (not replacement, additional) techniques now emerging.
When I was doing MySQL Professional Services, back when I started, most of my gigs had just barely heard of "sharding MySQL plus memcached". By the time I left that world, everyone had heard of it, many were doing it, and some very few were doing it well. Since then, we've all reached the point where nearly everyone who NEEDS it is doing it. And still the load and pressure rises on running systems, and so we are looking for more tools. And more tools are being developed. That need, that development, that excitement, is what "NoSQL" is all about.
But that won't be the end of memcached. The technique of the high-performance key-value store is just to useful of a building block, both on it's own, and as a sub-component of other technology components, to just throw out.
I'm sure that memcache will continue to evolve. There will be more implementations, there will be limitations removed, there will be more management tools, there will be other systems that add the memcached network protocol, there will be ORMs and other frameworks that will build in the assumption that memcached is available, there will be features to the protocol and implementations for shared hosting and cloud environments.
And even ignoring all that, there are still a myriad of internet and intranet systems running that really need what memcached can give them, and bringing it to them all is going to be a long and interesting task.
Memcached is going to stick around.
