caching-strategy-review

name	caching-strategy-review
enabled	true
description	Use when performing caching strategy review — reviews and designs caching strategies for services, evaluating cache placement, invalidation approaches, consistency trade-offs, and capacity planning. This template helps teams make informed decisions about what to cache, where to cache it, and how to handle cache lifecycle management.
required_connections	[{"prefix":"monitoring","label":"Monitoring Platform"}]
config_fields	[{"key":"service_name","label":"Service Name","required":true,"placeholder":"e.g., product-catalog-api"},{"key":"cache_technology","label":"Cache Technology","required":false,"placeholder":"e.g., Redis, Memcached, CDN"}]
features	["CACHING","PERFORMANCE","ARCHITECTURE"]

Caching Strategy Review

Phase 1: Current State Assessment

Document the existing caching setup (or lack thereof).

• Current cache technology: ___
• Cache hit ratio: ___%
• Cache miss latency (p99): ___
• Cache hit latency (p99): ___
• Origin latency without cache (p99): ___
• Cache size (current usage): ___
• Eviction rate: ___
• Cache-related incidents in last 90 days: ___

Phase 2: Cache Candidacy Analysis

Evaluate which data should be cached.

Data	Read Frequency	Write Frequency	Read:Write Ratio	Staleness Tolerance	Size per Entry	Cache Candidate
	High/Med/Low	High/Med/Low		Seconds/Minutes/Hours		Y/N

Decision Matrix — Cache Candidacy:

Criteria	Strong Candidate	Weak Candidate
Read:Write ratio	>10:1	<2:1
Staleness tolerance	Minutes to hours	Real-time required
Computation cost	Expensive queries or aggregations	Simple key lookups
Data size	Fits in memory budget	Too large for cache tier
Access pattern	Hot subset, power law distribution	Uniform random access

Phase 3: Cache Architecture Design

Cache Placement:

• Client-side cache (browser, mobile)
• CDN / edge cache
• API gateway cache
• Application-level cache (in-process)
• Distributed cache (Redis, Memcached)
• Database query cache

Cache Strategy Selection:

Pattern	When to Use	Trade-offs
Cache-aside (lazy loading)	General purpose, read-heavy	Cache miss penalty, potential stale data
Write-through	Need strong consistency	Write latency increase
Write-behind	Write-heavy, eventual consistency OK	Complexity, data loss risk
Read-through	Simplify application code	Cache dependency for all reads
Refresh-ahead	Predictable access patterns	Wasted refreshes for unused data

• Selected strategy: ___
• Justification: ___

Phase 4: Invalidation Strategy

• TTL-based expiration: ___ seconds
• Event-based invalidation (on write/update)
• Version-based invalidation (cache key includes version)
• Manual invalidation capability
• Cache warming strategy for cold starts

Consistency Analysis:

• Maximum acceptable staleness: ___
• Thundering herd protection (lock/collapse duplicate requests)
• Cache stampede prevention (jittered TTLs)
• Negative caching (cache misses to prevent repeated lookups)

Phase 5: Capacity and Resilience

• Memory budget: ___
• Eviction policy: LRU / LFU / TTL / Random
• Cache cluster sizing (nodes, replicas)
• Failure mode: Graceful degradation to origin
• Circuit breaker on cache failures
• Cache is not a single point of failure
• Monitoring and alerting on hit ratio, latency, evictions

Counter-Rationalizations

Shortcut	Counter	Why
"We can skip some steps for this case"	Adapt the workflow steps, don't skip them	Skipped steps are where incidents and oversights originate
"The user seems to already know what to do"	Complete all workflow phases with the user	The workflow catches blind spots that experience alone misses
"This is a minor case, full process is overkill"	Scale the process down, don't turn it off	Minor cases become major when unstructured; the process scales, not disappears
"I'll fill in the details later"	Complete each section before moving on	Deferred details are forgotten; real-time capture is more accurate
"The template output isn't necessary"	Always produce the structured output format	Structured output enables comparison, audit trails, and handoff to other teams

Output Format

Summary

• Service: ___
• Cache technology: ___
• Strategy: ___
• Expected hit ratio: ___%
• Expected latency improvement: ___
• Memory budget: ___

Action Items

• Implement selected caching strategy
• Configure TTL and invalidation rules
• Set up monitoring dashboards for cache metrics
• Add alerts for hit ratio drops and high eviction rates
• Load test with cache enabled and disabled
• Document cache warming procedure
• Plan for cache failure scenarios