Cache Invalidation and Reactive Systems
Phil Karlton famously said there are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things. While naming things may be subjective, cache invalidation is a problem that only gets harder as our systems grow more complex. As applications scale and users expect real-time data everywhere, traditional approaches to cache management crack under pressure.
Here's the thing about cache invalidation: it sits right at the center of the classic performance versus consistency trade-off. Mess it up, and your users are stuck looking at stale data. Maybe they see yesterday's stock prices, or worse, they're making business decisions based on outdated metrics. But nail the consistency part while implementing it poorly, and you've just thrown away all the performance benefits that made you add caching in the first place. This fundamental tension has been driving innovation in caching strategies for decades, from simple Time-to-live (TTL) expiration to increasingly complex dependency tracking systems.