As demonstrated by recent caching-related announcements from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, caching is hot topic in cloud computing these days. Last week, Amazon Web Services announced the Beta availability of the open source caching platform Redis as a complement to Memcached within its ElastiCache platform. Meanwhile, Microsoft announced news of its own Windows Azure Cache with greater cache sizes and reduced latency times. This week, Incapsula stoked the debate about optimal caching services for web-based applications by deciding to grant its customers an unprecedented degree of control over the caching parameters used to dictate which components of a website are cached and how.
On Tuesday, Incapsula announced an enhancement to its website acceleration platform by empowering application owners and IT administrators to customize the caching and acceleration parameters that govern the delivery of content to their website. As a result, application owners can control the delivery of content to web-based applications by determining which components of the application can be cached, and which need to be dynamically refreshed. Incapsula’s decision to lift the hood on the caching parameters for its web-based applications means that software engineers can (1) specify how a site’s content is cached and refreshed at a resource level; (2) implement asynchronous validation; (3) compress dynamic resources and (4) optimize the performance of network resources.
Incapsula’s delivery of customized caching functionality is enabled by an impressive user interface as follows:
In addition to a framework for enabling users to tweak caching parameters, Incapsula’s performance management platform tells engineers how their customized caching configurations are performing in order to enable them to gauge the efficacy of their caching strategy. The obvious question, now, of course, is whether other content delivery networks and hosting platforms with caching services will follow suit and grant users analogous degrees of flexibility regarding caching customization.
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