System Design

What is a VPC? A VPC is an on demand configurable pool of resources within a public cloud environment. It is generally isolated in some way from the public internet and perhaps other such private clouds and generally hosted by a public cloud provider like AWS, Google Cloud and so on. It allows organisations to better control their resources with additional security controls while benefitting from the scalability of the public cloud. You can then run a private network from your on-premises infrastructure to this Virtual Private Cloud and work as if you’ve just scaled your on-premises resources! ...

What is caching? Storing frequently accessed information closer to where you need it for faster subsequent access to it. Caching is so ubiquitous that you probably have benefited from it without even knowing about it. Your computer or your phone or other mobile devices use caching at different levels like at its hard drive, CPU, GPU, browser, operating system etc to improve its performance. And when you think about things outside your computer, like databases, web servers, DNS etc also use caches for the same reason, improving performance, by keeping frequently requested for items closest to where it is accessed, in a faster, more volatile storage system. Also cache storage is often times more expensive than regular storage, as it is often stored either in super fast access memory or solid state drives. Hence choosing what you store in the cache and how much you store in the cache is also something you must consider before deciding to use a cache. ...