Caching challenges and strategies

Matt Brinkley and Jas Chhabra lay out the uncomfortable truth about caches: they don't just add latency and cost benefits, they change your system's failure modes, because a cold or unavailable cache can dump surge traffic straight onto a downstream service that was never sized for it. The taxonomy here, local vs. external, inline vs. side, and how each fails differently, is one I still reach for when reviewing a caching design. Worth reading before you add a cache "for performance" without thinking through what happens when it goes away.

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