@ring.memcache(client, expire=60) def get_url(url): return requests.get(url).content can be written: def get_url(url): return request

@ring.memcache(client, expire=60) def get_url(url): return requests.get(url).content can be written: def get_url(url): return requests.get(url).content get_url = ring.memcache(client, expire=60)(get_url) Decorators are just syntactic sugar for that pattern. You are then welcome to instantiate your ring.memcache object and bind it were it pleases you. I would have provided a different API though: cache = pymemcache.client.Client(('127.0.0.1', 11211)) @cache.lru(expire=60) # wrapper of ring.cache(client) def get_url(url): return requests.get(url).content And accepted the alternative: cache = pymemcache.client.Client(conf_factory) def get_url(url): return requests.get(url).content get_url = cache.wraps.lru(get_url, expire=60) It's better to not expect all people to know about the details of decorators just to use your API, and a factory is a nice hook to have anyway: it say where the code for that dynamic configuration should be and code as documentation is the best doc. Also a patch() context manager would be nice for temporary caching: with cache.patch('module.lru', expire=60): get_url() But it's hard to do in a thread safe way to compromised would have to be made.