What Facebook’s Memcache Taught Me About Systems Thinking “The probability of reading transient stale data is a tunable parameter.” - Scaling Memcache at Facebook (NSDI, 2013) There’s a moment in every engineer’s life when a seemingly simple component like a cache, suddenly becomes the most complex piece in the stack. For me, that moment arrived reading Facebook’s paper on scaling Memcache. I didn’t expect a key-value store to challenge my understanding of systems architecture. ...
