Manual cache management is a 1990s tax you do not have to pay
Every engineering team building a fast app independently re-invents cache invalidation. It has been twenty years. It is time to stop.
Walk into any product team that has scaled past a few thousand users and you will find the same room. A whiteboard with arrows. Someone explaining why the cache is stale. Someone else suggesting a TTL. A third engineer saying the TTL will not fix it, because the write went to a different shard. The fourth person is just tired.
This conversation has been happening in roughly the same form since the 90s. The technology around it changed. Redis got cheaper. The cloud got bigger. The conversation stayed the same.
Why does this never get solved?
Because cache invalidation is not actually a generic problem. It is a problem about your specific data, your specific writes, and your specific consistency tolerance. So every team writes their own bespoke invalidation rules. Every team ships their own bugs.
redfly takes a different position: the database knows when data changed. Generate the cache layer from the schema, listen to the right change signals, and the cache stops lying. No TTL gymnastics. No "flush on deploy" rituals.
The honest tradeoff
Yes, you give up some control. You no longer hand-roll which fields get cached and which do not. In exchange, you stop staffing a permanent cache-invalidation team. For most companies, that is the right trade.
Cache invalidation is not hard. Doing it by hand, forever, for every product, is hard.