Enable caching as a cloud service to accelerate data access and customer experience

Problem

A cloud environment consists of many resources that are distributed across the Internet. Large volumes of data move across the cloud and the elastic nature of this architecture enables both storage and memory to be added to accelerate information access. In such an environment, enabling cache, anticipating future data access requirements and storing such data transparently in the cache, closer to where it  is expected to be consumed, significantly helps with performance.

Solution

Enable caching as-a-service. The service should scale caches across nodes and clusters and set cache manager properties. The caching as-a-service should support static and dynamic caching to enable application and service instances to process data. The cache managers must be configurable in terms of what to cache, retention periods, etc.

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Application

• Cache data to consumer groups at the edges of client such as social networking applications, media and news, blogs
• Dynamic data caching to support Application VMs such as JBoss, MySQL
• Online Stores pushing localized product catalogs to the edge of their consumer base

Impacts

Anti-Patterns

• Implement solution without allocating and configuring any cache
• Leveraging native application vendor provided caching solution. Most applications have built-in caching components enabled inside of the application that can be leveraged while installing and configuring the application instance

Related Patterns

• As-a-Service Pattern
• Simple Data Storage as-a-service Pattern
• Relational Data Storage as-a-service Pattern
• VM Resource Manager as-a-service Pattern
• Auto-scale as-a-Service Pattern
• Monitoring as-a-service Pattern

References

• Terracotta
• Memcache
• Ehcache, aiCache
• Amazon CloudFront