Future of CacheCow and the birth of CacheCore [Update: No CacheCore!]

CacheCow is my most popular OSS project which came to being back in 2012. It started its life as part of WebApiContrib but the need for a full-fledged project supporting different storage options soon led me to create CacheCow - which needed both client and server components.

With the availability of .NET Core which brings its completely new HTTP pipeline, the question has been when or how CacheCow will move to the .NET Core. On the client-side, HttpClient still is the king of making HTTP requests meaning CacheCow.Client will work when the long awaited .NET Standard 2.0 comes along allowing us to reference older .NET libraries. On the server-side, however, it is clear that CacheCow.Server has no place of existence since the pipeline in its entirety has been changed. So what should we do? Create a completely new project for both client-side and server-side or maintain CacheCow.Client (while migrating it to .NET Standard to support the new .NET) and create a new project for the server-side?

I have been thinking hard about this and for the reasons I will explain, I will be creating a completely new project called CacheCore (other contenders were Cache-vNext, CacheDnx and also recently CacheStandard) which will contain both client and server elements. [UPDATE: Please view newer announcement here]

If you would like to know the details (REST discussions, lessons learned including some gory confessions below) read the rest, otherwise feel free to watch the space as things will start to happen.

I am under no illusion that this will require quite some effort. Apart from the learning curve and niggles with tooling, I find the most frustrating aspect to be trying to google anything Core related: internet is now full of discarded evolutionary artifacts in the form of blogs, stackoverflow questions, tutorials and even MSDN documentation - each documenting the journey not the current state. If you think that is a small issue, ask anyone picking .NET Core for the first time. I wish we had a big giant flush and could have flushed all that to /dev/null wiping the history clean - never mind all those many many hours lost. OK, rant over - promise.

CacheCore.Server

As I said, I have confessions to make and one is just coming. When I designed server components of CacheCow as an API middleware, the idea was that they would be used for services that are purely RESTful in the sense that all changes to the state of the resource would be going through the API to carry out the state change. Initially there does not seem anything extra-ordinary about this but I gradually learnt that cache coherency is a very big responsibility for a mere middleware to take on.

First of all, there are many services out there that the underlying data could change without a request passing through the API. What is worse is that even if all state change is via API calls, the change to a resource could invalidate other resources. For example, a PUT request to /cars/123 will invalidate the /cars/123 which is fine, but what about ‘/cars’? So I started thinking about resources in terms of collection and instance and CacheCow.Server started to infer collection and instance resources based on a convention - hence I used Route Pattern concept so the application could configure the cache invalidation, so here route pattern would be /cars/*.

But the problem did not stop there. A change to /cars/123/contracts/456 could invalidate all these URLS: /cars/123/contracts, /cars/123 and possibly /cars - hence CacheCow now needs to walk up the tree and invalidate all those resources. And now to the next level of headaches: a POST /orders/1234 could invalidate customer/987 as there is no apparent connection unless the application tells us - which made me introduce the concept of Linked Route Patterns so the application could configure these relationships. And configuring was of course a pain, and frankly I think except me and a handful other people really did not quite get what I was on about.

Now, I believe it is too much of a responsibility for an HTTP middleware to do cache coherency. As such CacheCore.Server will be a lot simpler: no more entity tag storage, application will decide to use ETag or LastModifieDate for cache coherency and will be responsible for providing these values - although I will provide some helpers. One key difference in this implementation would be a set of tools fitting different scenarios rather than a single HTTP Caching god-class.

To explain this aspect further, HTTP caching is a spectrum of primitives that help you build more scalable (caching) and consistent (concurrency) systems - some of which are basic and used by many, while others have remained obscure and seldom used. Caching and expiry on resources are better known while from my experience, conditional PUT to achieve optimistic concurrency is rarely used - even conditional GET is rarely used by HTTP clients other than browsers. As such, CacheCore will come with three filters starting from the most basic to the most advanced:

• BasicCacheFilter: This is the simplest filter which covers returning Cache-Control headers according to expiry configuration, reading the ETag or LastModified from the returned model (or inferring them by using reflection) and handling conditional GET for you. As long as you have a property called ETag or LastModified (or LastModifiedDate, etc) on the model you return from your API, this will work. For conditional GETs to this filter you would not save on any pressure your “database”: API calls will result on retrieval of data to the API so the filter can find the ETag or LastModified and accordingly respond to conditional GET requests.

• LookupCacheFilter: This filter improves on the BasicCacheFilter by allowing the application to provide a callback mechanism for the application to look up ETag or LastModified without having to load the full model. Caching almost always gets used on resources where the operation is expensive either in IO or computation costs and this approach helps you to replace loading the full model with a light-weight lookup call. For example, let’s say the resource is /cars/123 and you keep a LastModifiedDate on your cars database and use hash of the LastModifiedDate as the ETag (you could use LastModifiedDate to do cache validation on the date but HTTP date’s precision is sadly up to a second which might not be enough for you). In this case, the filter will enquire the application for ETag or LastModified of the resource and you can call your database and read that value for car:id=123 without loading the whole car - which is going to be a lighter database call. So this filter will do all BasicCacheFilter (and in more efficient way) and will even do conditional PUT for you. What is the problem with this one? Consistency: in terms of conditional PUT, validation is not atomic, e.g. you look up the ETag and you find the condition is met and proceed to update meanwhile data could have changed between the lookup and update (same could also apply to conditional GET but has less serious impact). This is not a problem for everyone hence I think this filter hits the sweet spot for simplicity and effectiveness.

• StrongConsistencyCacheFilter: This is basically the same as above but maintains airtight consistency by allowing the application to implement atomic conditional GET and PUT - which means application has to do more.
  

I have plans for these to be GET or PUT specific since actions are usually designed as such.
Now you might ask, why CacheCore is a filter and not a middleware? If you remember, CacheCow.Server was a DelegatingHandler (akin to an ASP.NET Core middleware). Well, here is another lesson learnt: caching is a highly localised concern, it is a mistake to implement it as a global HTTP intermediary.

CacheCore.Client

Considering the client story in .NET Core for HTTP has not been drastically changed, it is fair to assume CacheCow.Client can still be used.

That is true, however, there are a few reasons I would like to start afresh. First of all, CacheCow’s inception and the main of the codebase was designed when .NET yet did not have an await keyword. This resulted in a .ContinueWith() soup which was hard to read and difficult to maintain. On the other hand, some interfaces supported async while others did not, resulting in breaking the async all the way rule. Also I had in mind for the storage to be clever about how much storage it uses per site and implement LRU while many underlying storages did not provide the primitive to do so - and frankly in this 5 years I have never needed it.

I think it is time to get rid of these shortcomings hence there will be a new client project too.

Future of CacheCow.Server and CacheCow.Client

It would be naive to think everyone will move to .NET Core straightaway. In fact, with .NET Standard 2.0, Microsoft has shown to have realised there needs to be a better interoperability between the classic .NET and the .NET Core. Apart from interoperability, I think people will carry on using and building .NET APIs for another few years.

Fore these reasons, I will carry on supporting CacheCow and releasing bug fixes, etc. Thanks for helping it improve by using it, reporting issues and sending bug fixes.