Caching Challenges and Strategies

While caching is a relatively easy way to mitigate the pains of slow databases, it does not come without challenges. Below are some common caching challenges and their respective solutions to help you get the most out of your caching solution.

When you add an external, standalone caching system to accelerate data accesses, you necessarily add more complexity to your architecture. You now have a separate technology to manage and coordinate with the other technologies in your stack. If you start seeing anomalies in your performance or data outputs, troubleshooting the system can be more complex than expected.

With Hazelcast Platform, you can add powerful caching capabilities and also do much more, which lets you reduce the complexity of your architecture. Instead of having separate silos like a digital integration hub, a stream processing cluster, a machine learning (ML) inference cluster, a fast reference database, etc., you can consolidate all of those capabilities into Hazelcast Platform while gaining the performance advantages of a cache. Instead of planning for a single-function solution that adds another silo to your stack, you can use Hazelcast Platform to build sophisticated applications.

When deploying a cache, you always need to consider the impact of returning stale data. In many cases, stale data will cause downstream problems, so it is important to plan ahead for that and identify the strategies for cache expiration. As described in our Caching Best Practices page, you have a couple of straightforward options:

• Implement a refresh-ahead cache.
• Set a time-to-live (TTL) value for your cached data elements.

The options above also have some challenges to consider. Implementing a refresh-ahead cache typically requires other technologies to proactively update the cache. And a TTL setting will not absolutely eliminate the risk of stale data.

Hazelcast Platform provides all the features necessary to easily implement a refresh-ahead cache in a single cluster. This reduces the complexity of bolting on separate technologies to your cache to ensure up-to-date data. The change data capture (CDC), distributed processing, and stream processing capabilities in Hazelcast Platform let you easily deploy a refresh-ahead cache.

If you are caching sensitive data (e.g., personally identifiable information [PII], personal health information [PHI]), then you need to make sure you enable security in your caching solution. Many users believe that because the data in caches is ephemeral, then you don’t have to secure it. However, if you think of a cache as a type of database, then you certainly want to diligently protect the data stored in the cache as well as in other data stores.

Modern technologies that are used for caching have security controls to protect your cached data with role-based access controls along with over-the-wire encryption, to ensure no breach or data tampering occurs.

Hazelcast Platform provides the caching capabilities you need including a full security suite to provide role-based access controls and encryption on your cached data.