Had yet another conversation yesterday with a team burning themselves on a Redis cache misconfiguration. Hot keys, thundering herd, memory policy oversights — the usual scars. One of the replies on the HN thread mentioned something that keeps showing up in these discussions: they just use a database table + filesystem, no Redis, no Memcached.
Sounded like a lazy joke. It isn't.
The setup
You already have a database. You already have a filesystem. You can build a perfectly functional caching layer with both.
The database table looks something like:
