Our web applications are getting increasingly more complicated. They are becoming more distributed and increasingly powered by combinations of complex, constantly changing and large datasets. All while users are increasingly more connected and want the latest information instantly without any slow page loads or stale information.
To address this, developers have turned to layers of caching and single page applications so that there are layers of aggregated and preloaded state as close to the user as possible, to be immediately available when it is requested. This comes at a high cost: it is very difficult to invalidate or update those caches when the upstream information changes. This is especially problematic when the stale caches can accidentally cause real bugs rather than show stale data to users.
The big issue here is that we're not just caching expensive-to-compute static data. We are caching data that changes over time. There are a number of architectual patterns that can be applied, but to date, n