Cacheil

Cacheil is a hypothetical multi-layer caching framework used to illustrate how data caching can be integrated across application, service, and storage tiers. The name suggests a Cacheable Intermediate Layer, highlighting its role as a performance enhancement across systems rather than a single storage mechanism.

Overview: Cacheil envisions a three-tier cache stack: a local in-process cache, a distributed cache cluster, and a durable backing store. The layers balance latency and throughput, with invalidation rules to maintain correctness.

Architecture: Cacheil provides a simple, language-agnostic key-value API with namespacing, TTL, and pluggable eviction policies (LRU, LFU, ARC). It supports write-through and write-back modes, event-driven invalidation, and adapters for Redis, Memcached, or in-memory stores, in synchronous or asynchronous modes.

Design considerations: Common concerns include stale data, cache stampede, and invalidation on underlying data changes. Cacheil emphasizes observability through metrics and tracing and supports safe cross-language serialization.

Status: As a theoretical construct, Cacheil is discussed in tutorials and design papers rather than as a widely adopted project. It serves to illustrate trade-offs among latency, throughput, and consistency.