ARCast.TV - Scott Hanselman on scaling websites with caching

The Discussion

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  When this thing is gonna release, I've been hearing about it for years, and the last CTP was out last April, I though the whole thing is dead already

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  What are the plans to bring Velocity to Azure?

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  Just use memcached like the rest of the world.

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  Memcached is cool, but Velocity has some features like failover and regions that memcached doesn't. With memcached if you lose a node, it's gone. With Velocity your data is replicated.

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  To me that sounds like you're trying to add reliability where there shouldn't be any; The cache layer. A cache is volatile; If stuff is gone, or it expires, you repopulate it. Leave reliability to the database, it's very good at it.

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  Yes and no. It depends on how easy it is to repopulate. If the date is write-through and hasn't been written to a persistent store, like activity date, then it's gone forever. If you're in a situation like a bank, talking to a mainframe, you may get charged for each hit to the backend and losing a cache could mean a chargeback.

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  That's true, admittedly I hadn't considered such a case, only thinking about in scenarios where e.g. memcached would work. Isn't caching a bit of a wrong term for such use however?

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  Valid points...perhaps "distributed memory server"?

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  Hehe.. Something like that.

   

  Bonus points if you can make Velocity into an abbreviation describing it.