Boosting Application Performance and User Experience
Rangaraj Balakrishnan
Cloud DevSecOps Architect | Solutions | DevSecOps Mentor | Fin-Ops Strategist | Empowering IT Professionals and Students Through Career Mentoring
Application performance and user experience are key success factors in the fast paced digital world. This is one of few things that you can do in a day to get fast wins - good caching to boost both. Among the plethora of solutions available to architects when using Google Cloud Platform (GCP), server-side caching is one of the most effective ways of achieving incredible performance and cutting down on response times to ensure that users get the best possible experience. This article discusses some of the most important caching strategies for GCP that can make your application perform so much better.
Why Caching is Crucial
Caching, as the name suggests, is taking copies of files or data and storing it in a temporary storage location cache to decrease the time of access to this particular data. Applications can more rapidly and efficiently deliver information for a snappier, more pleasant user experience by reducing the amount of database work, diminishing network churn and accelerating response times by following the practice of performing good caching.
Strategies Key Caching GCP
1. Memorystore as a Memory-Based Cache
Memory store for Redis and Memcached are fully managed, in-memory data stores, suitable for use as high-performance caches. Memory store provides sub-millisecond access times, therefore it's tailor-made for caching session data, user profiles, as well as other fast data accessibilities by user applications.
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2. Cloud CDN and A Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Cloud CDN uses Google's globally distributed edge locations to cache static and dynamic content at the edge in memory or on disk. This set-up helps to reduce latency and improve load times for end-users around the globe!).
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3. Caching files in various cloud storage.
In addition, you could leverage the capabilities of Cloud Storage at its core and attempt storing of huge objects like images, videos, and other static resources as if they were cache. You can make it so that these assets are cached in user browser and edge locations (cloudflare) which means the server will have to fetch them less times.
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4. On An API Caching with API Gateway and Cloud Functions
For API-driven applications, you can use API Gateway with Cloud Functions to cache serverless function responses. This eliminates the need for duplicate processing of the same requests, thus improving the overall performance and reducing any associated cost.
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5. Caching Database queries from Cloud SQL and Cloud Spanner
Query result caching (Cloud SQL or Cloud Spanner) - Use cached query results to decrease load on your database and strengthen performance of read-heavy applications.
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6. Cloud Run and Cloud Functions as Edge Caching
This refers to caching serverless function outputs near to end-users by running Cloud Run and Cloud Functions at edge locations. This method of uniting is very good for applications that are running around the globe.
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Practice are recommended when caching here on GCP.
1. Determine What to Cache
There is no need to cache all data. With minimum effort, you should identify this data and should be readily available, mostly read-only and does not heavily change. This might be user session data, product catalogs, and static assets etc.
2. Configure Right Cache Expire Cache
By setting the expiry time to caches we can maintain the freshness and relevance of the cache data. When balancing the tradeoff between cache hit rates and data freshness, cache most of the traffic, but pay attention to making sure that your cache doesn't serve stale content.
3. Livestreaming GCP Monitoring Tools
Leverage more GCP monitoring like Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Trace to keep an eye on your cache performance and identify bottlenecks so that you can use data to adjust your cache implementation.
4. Optimize Cache Invalidation
Understanding how cache invalidation functions helps in ensuring that stale or altered data is not sent to the end-users. Use strategies for cache invalidation (e.g., time-based expiration, manual invalidation, event-driven invalidation when data is updated).
5. Use Two Cache Levels
For more complex applications, you might want to use multiple caching layers, for example in-memory caching with Memory store, CDN caching with Cloud CDN, and database query caching. Different performance requirements can be met with this multi-tiered approach without sacrificing overall application efficiency.
Conclusion
Caching is an important aspect of any web application; and if truth be told, having effective caching strategies in place can really make a difference in the performance of your application and that of the user experience of it. The goal is to use Memory store, Cloud CDN, Cloud Storage, and other tools to make the application always-on, blazingly fast, and capable of scaling to big loads. Optimize your caching strategy and outpace competition in the meantime.
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