Is there a simpler way?

I recently saved a company 𝗮 𝘄𝗵𝗼𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 £𝟭𝟵,𝟮𝟬𝟬 𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿 by reviewing their caching strategy.

👉 Here's how I did it...

First, I planned a comprehensive approach to review the company's caching strategy.

This involved assessing their current suite of applications to determine how they were currently caching, the blast radius of any change, and whether they needed to cache at all.

Next, I would document the possible caching strategies available and explain why they would or wouldn't be suitable for their needs.

After narrowing down the options, I'd recommend a change to the strategy based on suitability, simplicity, blast radius, and development effort.

I was eager to get my hands on the code, but there was much anxiety around code changes of this nature due to some recent production issues... and I was new to the code base...

👉 I asked myself - "Is there a simpler way to achieve this?"

I needed some more information:

👉 What was the current load on the system?
👉 What was the future expected load on the system?
👉 How equipped was the current infrastructure to handle this?

To cut a long story short:

👉 There was no clever caching strategy implementation.
👉 There was no exceptionally performant code - in fact, no code was changed at all.

It turns out the infrastructure was extremely well equipped, so much so that reducing the tiers to bring it in line with the reality of the load on the system and future expectations was enough to achieve these savings...

It's amazing how sometimes the simplest solutions can have the biggest impact.

That infrastructure may or may not have been configured that way for the previous 12 months... 🤷‍♂️