About caching responses

With response caching, you can significantly reduce the number of requests Gloo Edge makes to its upstream services.

The Gloo Edge Enterprise caching filter is an extension that is built on top of the Envoy cache filter, and includes all of the functionality that the Envoy cache filter exposes. In addition, Gloo Edge provides the ability to store the cached objects in a Redis instance, including Redis configuration options such as setting a password.

Review the information on this page to learn more about how caching works in Gloo Edge.

Caching without response validation

The following diagram shows how response caching works without validation.

1. When the gateway receives an incoming request from a client, it checks with the caching server if a cached response for the referenced upstream is available. Because no cached response is initially available, the request is forwarded to the upstream service where the request is processed. When the upstream service sends a response to the client, the upstream can indicate that the response is cacheable by providing the cache-control response header. When Gloo Edge receives a response with a cache-control header, the response is cached by the caching server for the amount of time that is specified in the header.
2. Subsequent requests from clients are not forwarded to the upstream. Instead, clients receive the cached response with an age response header from the caching server directly. The age response header shows the number of seconds that passed since the original response was sent. After the time that was specified in the cache-control header passes, the cached response becomes stale. Requests are then forwarded to the upstream service again and a new response is sent to the client.

Caching with response validation

The following diagram shows how response caching works when the upstream service supports response validation.

1. When the gateway receives an incoming request from a client, it checks with the caching server if a cached response for the referenced upstream is available. Because no cached response is initially available, the request is forwarded to the upstream service where the request is processed. When the upstream service sends a response to the client, the upstream can indicate that the response is cacheable by providing the cache-control response header. When Gloo Edge receives a response with a cache-control header, the response is cached by the caching server for the amount of time that is specified in the header.
2. Subsequent requests from clients are not forwarded to the upstream. Instead, clients receive the cached response with an age response header from the caching server directly. The age response header shows the number of seconds that passed since the original response was sent.
3. After the time that was specified in the cache-control header passes, the cached response becomes stale and the response validation period starts. In order for response validation to work, upstream services must be capable of processing If-Modified-Since request headers that are sent from the client.
   1. If the upstream’s response changed since the time that is specified in the If-Modified-Since request header, the new response is forwarded to the client and cached by the caching server (3a). Subsequent requests receive the cached response until the cache timeframe passes again (as shown in Step 2).
   2. If the response did not change, the upstream service sends back a 304 Not Modified HTTP response code. The gateway then gets the cached response from the caching server and returns it to the client (3b). Response validation continues for subsequent requests until a new response is received from the upstream service.