Speaker
Abstract
Modern web applications widely deploy cache across the stack to speed up data access and improve throughput.
In this talk, I will discuss three trends in hardware, workload, and cache usage that shape the design of modern caches.
The slow down of memory capacity scaling, the exploding data creation rate, and the wide adoption of Time-to-live (TTL) motivated the design of Segcache (https://paper.segcache.com and https://open-source.segcache.com).
Segcache is a new cache storage design that provides high memory efficiency and high throughput via metadata sharing to save space wasted on metadata, approximate indexing to efficiently remove short-lived data, and macro management for high throughput and linear scalability.
The design of Segcache is driven by the insight that key-value cache is different from key-value store + eviction, and is the outcome of exploring different trade-offs between caching and storage.
We deploy Segcache as standalone distributed caches and embedded off-heap caches for JVM-based microservices at Twitter. The distributed cache deployment significantly reduces the resources (CPU/DRAM) provisioned for cache clusters; the embedded deployment allows us to speed up data access and reduce GC pause time.
QCon San Francisco 2022 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
From the same track
Monday 24 October
10:35 Bayview Session Backends Backends in Dart Chris Swan Engineer @atsigncompan, Previously Fellow @DXCTechnology, CTO & Director of R&D roles @CohesiveNetworks @UBS @Capital SCF and @Credit Suisse Dart's popularity has surged in the past few years, as it's the language behind Flutter - Google's cross platform front end framework. That's now driving a notion of 'Full Stack Dart', where if you've spent time learning Dart for the front end, why not also use it for the back end. 11:50 Bayview Session Backends 24/7 State Replication Todd Montgomery Ex Researcher @Nasa, Engineering Fellow @ Adaptive Financial Consulting and a High Performance Distributed Systems Whisperer Systems that operate non-stop, 24/7 are standard in many consumer-facing industries. Often, but definitely not always, these systems do not have aggressive SLAs nor high availability needs to the degree that some financial systems demand. But that is changing. 13:40 Ballroom A Session Ubiquitous Caching: A Journey of Building Efficient Distributed and In-Process Caches at Twitter Juncheng Yang Ph.D. student @CarnegieMellon, Focus on Efficiency and Performance, Previously @Twitter & @Cloudflare, Facebook Fellow Modern web applications widely deploy cache across the stack to speed up data access and improve throughput. In this talk, I will discuss three trends in hardware, workload, and cache usage that shape the design of modern caches. 14:55 Ballroom BC Session Panel: Building Modern Backends Chris Swan, Frank Yu, Juncheng Yang Join today’s speakers in an open panel conversation about modern backends and the languages used to build them. Our panelists today come from backgrounds focused on high performance, legacy modernization, and low latency. The speakers span a variety of software languages and industries. 16:10 Ballroom BC Session Microservices Data Mesh: Are We There Yet? Zhamak Dehghani CEO and Founder @Stealth Startup, Data Mesh Founder, Author, Speaker Standing at an inflection point is a magical experience. It’s where we look at what has come before, learn from it, and choose a new path. Data Mesh has motivated many organizations to stand at an inflection point of their approach to data. 17:25 Ballroom A Session Backends Leveraging Determinism Frank Yu Director of Engineering @Coinbase, Previously Principal Engineer and Director @FairX Determinism is a very powerful concept when paired with fast business logic. We discuss both intuitive and not-so-obvious architecture choices that can be made to dramatically scale and simplify systems with these properties.