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My understanding is it's about application state - cookies, mutations, etc... If the request is "give me the profile photo of the logged-in user" - the respons
by stellar678 7y ago
My understanding is it's about application state - cookies, mutations, etc...
If the request is "give me the profile photo of the logged-in user" - the response depends on the stateful question of who is the logged-in user.
If the request is "give me the gmail logo" - the response is identical no matter who's making the request. These can be cached on an edge node without regard to application state.
- SahAssar 7y agoOkay, I understand. I have never heard that being called a stateless cache though, in my experience that is called a public cache. That is also what it is called in the http cache-control standard. I get what you mean, but calling a cache "stateless" seems like a contradiction in terms to me.
- jefftk 7y agoThe cache has state, but it's caching stateless requests.
- maccam94 7y agoYou're talking about HTTP cache control headers, which is a use case that typically avoids storing stateful data in server-side caches. Caches are also used outside of HTTP however, and sometimes those caches can have state (such as expensive database queries). Taking down a cache with state can have a more severe impact on service performance or data consistency. The blog post mentioned it this way to convey that the cache operation should be relatively simple and generally not return many errors, and that disabling the servers would be low risk (no data loss or severe performance impact).