📕 Documentation

Sometimes topics can be explained a little bit more, and the following docs can help you with that.

🦄 A Gentle Introduction

Make yourself comfortable with FusionCache.

👩‍🏫 Step By Step

A complete step by step example of why a cache is useful, why FusionCache could be even more so, how to apply most of the options available and what results you can expect to obtain.

🆎 Comparison

A feature comparison between existing .NET caching solutions, to help you choose which one to use.

🧬 Diagrams

Sometimes it's nice to be able to visualize the internal flow of a system, even more so for such a complex beast as an hybrid cache like FusionCache.

So, diagrams!

🎚️ Options

How global and entry options work in FusionCache, how to use them better and things to know.

✔️ Features

FusionCache has a lot of features, let's see them grouped together:

Resiliency

• 🛡️ Cache Stampede: automatic protection, both local (single node) and distributed (multiple nodes)
• 💣 Fail-Safe: a mechanism to avoids transient failures, by reusing an expired entry as a temporary fallback
• ↩️ Auto-Recovery: self-healing for the entire cache, all automatically

Performance & Scalability

• 🔀 L1+L2: any implementation of IDistributedCache can be used as an optional 2nd level, all transparently
• 📢 Backplane: in a multi-node scenario, it can notify the other nodes about changes in the cache, so all will be in-sync
• ⏱ Soft/Hard Timeouts: a slow factory (or distributed cache) will not slow down your application, and no data will be wasted
• 🦅 Eager Refresh: start a non-blocking background refresh before the expiration occurs
• 🔂 Conditional Refresh: like HTTP Conditional Requests, but for caching
• 🚀 Background Distributed Operations: distributed operations can easily be executed in the background, safely, for better performance

Flexibility

• 📛 Named Caches: easily work with multiple named caches, even if differently configured
• 🏷️ Tagging: tags can be associated to entries, to later expire them all at once
• 🧼 Clear: clear an entire cache, even with shared L2, cache key prefix, etc
• Ⓜ️ Microsoft HybridCache: can be used as an implementation of the new HybridCache abstraction from Microsoft, all while adding extra features
• 🧙‍♂️ Adaptive Caching: for when you don't know upfront the entry options (eg: Duration), since they depends on the value being cached itself
• 🔃 Dependency Injection + Builder: native support for Dependency Injection, with a nice fluent interface including a Builder support
• ♊ Auto-Clone: be sure that cached values returned can be safely modified
• 💫 Fully sync/async: native support for both the synchronous and asynchronous programming model
• 🧩 Plugins: extend FusionCache with additional behavior like adding support for metrics, statistics, etc...

Observability

• 🔭 OpenTelemetry: native observability support via OpenTelemetry
• 📜 Logging: comprehensive, structured and customizable, via the standard ILogger interface
• 📞 Events: a comprehensive set of events, both at a high level and at lower levels (memory/distributed)

Ⓜ️ Microsoft HybridCache

We've probably all heard about the new kid on the block introduced by Microsoft with .NET 9: HybridCache.

So what does it mean for FusionCache? Does one replace the other? Or can they somehow work together?

It's pretty cool actually, so let's find out!