If you ever have designed or want to design a platform/site that needs to support some steep non-functional requirements like 1Billion hits, then you have to rever to using cache as a key part of the framework. How cache as we have known it back in the days is not longer just plugging in a library and start writing to it. There is a lot more to it when we talk in context of a Digital Media platform and how you deal with very high loads. This article will talk about principles that will help you design for
– Performance: Caching is a pattern that we employ to increase the overall performance the application by storing the (processed) data in a store that is a) closest to the consumer of the data and b) is accessible quickly
– Scalability: In cases when we need to make the same data-set available to various consumers of the system, caching as a pattern makes it possible for us to scale the systems much better. Caching as we discussed earlier allows us to have processed data which takes away the need to run the same processing time and again which facilitates scalability
– Availability: Building on similar principles as of scalability, caching allows us to put in place data in areas where systems/components can survive outages be it network or other components. While it may lead to surfacing stale data at points, the systems are still available to the end users.