CacheManager

CacheManager is a software component or design pattern that provides centralized control over one or more caches. It abstracts the creation, configuration, and lifecycle of cache instances and coordinates storage, eviction, expiration, and invalidation policies. By offering a uniform interface, it enables applications to read and write cached data without needing to manage individual caches directly, simplifying maintenance and enabling cross-cutting features such as cache warming and statistics collection.

Core concepts:

- Cache registration and lookup

- Expiration and eviction policies

- In-memory and distributed backends

- Tiered or multi-cache configurations

- Thread-safety and synchronization

- Cache statistics and monitoring

- Serialization and data transformation

Architectural considerations:

CacheManager implementations may be provided by language ecosystems as libraries or built-in services, and can operate as either in-process caches or distributed caches that synchronize across processes or nodes. In practice, developers use CacheManager to implement transparent caching: the application code interacts with the manager; the manager selects the appropriate cache, applies policies, and falls back to the primary data store when a cache miss occurs.

Common use cases and trade-offs:

- Web applications caching database queries, computations, or session data

- Microservices sharing a common cache layer

- Balancing freshness and performance, with potential risk of stale data if invalidation is misconfigured

See also:

Cache, Caching strategy, Eviction policy, JCache (cache API) and CacheManager libraries in various ecosystems.