Popular Use Cases of Distributed Cache

There are many use cases for which an application developer may include a distributed cache as part of their architecture. These include:

• Application acceleration:
  • Applications that rely on disk-based relational databases can’t always meet today’s increasingly demanding transaction performance requirements.
  • By storing the most frequently accessed data in a distributed cache, you can dramatically reduce the I/O bottleneck of disk-based systems.
  • This ensures your applications run much faster, even with a large number of transactions when usage spikes.
• Storing web session data :
  • A site may store user session data in a cache to serve as inputs for shopping carts and recommendations.
  • With a distributed cache, you can have a large number of concurrent web sessions that can be accessed by any of the web application servers that are running the system.
  • This lets you load balance web traffic over several application servers and not lose session data should any application server fail.
• Decreasing network usage/costs :
  • By caching data in multiple places in your network, including on the same computers as your application, you can reduce network traffic and leave more bandwidth available for other applications that depend on the network.
• Reducing the impact of interruptions :
  • Depending on the architecture, a cache may be able to answer data requests even when the source database is unavailable. This adds another level of high availability to your system.
• Extreme scaling :
  • Some applications request significant volumes of data. By leveraging more resources across multiple machines, a distributed cache can answer those requests.

Distributed caches are essential tools for improving the speed and reliability of applications in distributed computing environments. By storing frequently accessed data closer to where it’s needed and across multiple servers, distributed caches reduce latency and ease the load on backend systems. In this article, we’ll explore what distributed caches are, how they work, and why they’re crucial for modern applications.