A common practice to offload traffic from MySQL 5.6 is to use a caching layer to store expensive result sets or objects.  Some typical use cases include:

• Complicated query result set (search results, recent users, recent posts, etc)
• Full page output (relatively static pages)
• Full objects (user or cart object built from several queries)
• Infrequently changing data (configurations, etc)

In pseudo-code, here is the basic approach:

data = fetchCache(key)
if (data) {
  return data
}
data = callExpensiveFunction(params)
storeCache(data, key)
return data

Memcached is a very popular (and proven) option used in production as a caching layer.  While very fast, one major potential shortcoming of memcached is that it is not persistent.  While a common design consideration when using a cache layer is that “data in cache may go …