Cache Notifications and Event-driven Architecture with NCache

By Sriram Mannava

Introduction

Imagine you are searching for a product on an online shopping website. You find the product and see that the item is in stock. You have added the item to your cart and while trying to checkout, you instantly see that the product has suddenly gone out of stock. On another website, you are trying to buy a product and you see the website shows you x number of users have purchased this product in the past y days and there's a live counter that shows how much of stock is left which goes down as time goes by.

These are some examples of applications leveraging the power of event-driven architecture. In this architecture, a fleet of microservices access data from the backend via a distributed cache layer for high performance. Whenever data is modified in the cache, these microservices are notified and the change is immediately propagated among all the microservices. This design helps in building applications that are scalable and can stay updated with data modifications that happen in the backend.

Understanding Caching and Event-driven Architecture

Caching plays an important role in optimizing application performance by storing frequently used data in memory.

This reduces the need to retrieve data from slower data sources like databases. On the other hand, event-driven architecture decouples components of a system, allowing them to communicate through events, enabling real-time responsiveness and scalability.