←back to thread

475 points danielstocks | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
mavster ◴[] No.27303085[source]
I'm just guessing, but...

"developer gets a great idea - let's push an update to the API as a GET request so we can cache this on the CDN... forgetting that the JWT token is potentially returned in the call. Now, whoever makes the call first gets their JWT token stored for everyone else to load instead when the API call is made."

Ta-da, Klarna.

replies(10): >>27303554 #>>27303645 #>>27303782 #>>27303857 #>>27303919 #>>27304192 #>>27304408 #>>27304728 #>>27305016 #>>27305863 #
irjustin ◴[] No.27304192[source]
I can 100% see this being the cause if this comes out as the root.

But... API's really shouldn't be cached? At least not at the CDN level. The risk of serving up stale dashboard data alone makes users go ????... and we definitely don't want - not even mentioning the problem here, that's crazy.

replies(3): >>27304609 #>>27305462 #>>27307674 #
toredash ◴[] No.27305462[source]
Of course you can cache it, but your assuming it should never. Nothing wrong with caching API calls on the CDN forever as long as your purge the cache once you need it. Event based purging.
replies(1): >>27308333 #
1. cowmoo728 ◴[] No.27308333[source]
"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things."

Cache invalidation is always a very tricky affair. It can work for a while but as complexity grows it gets very hard to maintain and debug. It's very much a "here be dragons" situation and you have to go into it with your guard up.

I was at a small startup that had a quick and dirty contractor built API. It worked, but for our largest customers, 99th percentile latency started going over the API gateway timeout. The quick and dirty hack on top of it was aggressive caching with too-clever invalidation logic. It worked until new features were added and then it started failing dramatically and unpredictably. The bugs were an absolute nightmare. We ended up spending almost a year cleaning up the data model, sharding things by customer, and fixing a bunch of N+1 queries, all so that we could get rid of our API cache layer and kill the bugs for good.