Multi-tenant In-memory Cache Segmentation for Web Data
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Solution Overview
Problem
Cloud application development platforms face challenges in efficiently managing and caching data across multiple users and organizations, particularly in maintaining data security and performance while handling computationally expensive and infrequently changing data.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a multi-tenant database system with an in-memory cache that uses separate caches for user sessions and organizations, along with a cache hierarchy and metadata management to ensure data security and visibility scope, allowing for efficient data retrieval and storage across multiple application servers.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Speed
If data is cached in memory to improve retrieval speed, then access time is reduced, but data security and visibility scope become more difficult to manage across multiple tenants
Solution Approach 1:
The cache is divided into separate tenant-specific cache regions, with each tenant having isolated cache space. This segmentation allows fast data retrieval within each tenant's cache while maintaining security boundaries that prevent cross-tenant data access, thus resolving the contradiction between speed and management complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
A cache manager component is introduced as an intermediary between application servers and the in-memory cache. This manager handles visibility scope enforcement, data placement, and retrieval coordination, simplifying the complexity of managing multi-tenant cache operations while maintaining fast access speeds.
2Productivity
If a shared cache is used across multiple application servers to improve data sharing, then collaboration efficiency increases, but data security and tenant isolation are compromised
Solution Approach 1:
The shared cache is segmented into tenant-isolated regions where each tenant's data is stored in dedicated cache spaces. Application servers can efficiently share data within their tenant's region while the segmentation ensures that security boundaries are maintained, preventing unauthorized access to other tenants' data.
Solution Approach 2:
Different cache regions are assigned different security qualities and visibility scopes appropriate to each tenant. This allows optimized data sharing within each tenant's local cache region while maintaining appropriate security isolation, resolving the contradiction between productivity and reliability.
3Productivity
If computationally expensive data is cached to reduce processing load, then system performance improves, but cache memory consumption increases
Solution Approach 1:
Only the essential and frequently accessed portions of computationally expensive data are extracted and cached in the in-memory cache. Less frequently accessed data remains in external storage, allowing the system to improve performance for critical operations while limiting cache memory consumption to only what is necessary.
Solution Approach 2:
The cache stores a partial set of computationally expensive data - specifically, only those portions that are frequently accessed across multiple tenants. This partial caching approach provides sufficient performance improvement for common operations while avoiding the excessive memory consumption that would result from caching all possible data.
Data Source
AI summary
Techniques are disclosed relating to caching web application data. In some embodiments, a computing system maintains a multi-tenant database and an in-memory cache for the database. In some embodiments, the computing system is configured to store data in an entry in response to a store request and retrieve data in response to a read request. In various embodiments, data cached by one tenant is not visible to other tenants. The cache may be partitioned and each partition may have an assigned capacity. The computing system may be configured to evict cached data based on capacity thresholds, least-recently-used information, time-to-live information, amount of data in an entry, etc. The cache may indicate misses when requested data is not present. Various disclosed techniques may improve web application performance while maintaining privacy between tenants.