It is similar to Slicer in terms of the abstraction (I built Slicer at Google) but the architecture, implementation and algorithms have a lot of differences
These show up once you have a certain scale where it is either cost inefficient or the hot spots are very dynamic. They also try to avoid latency by being eventually consistent sidecars instead of proxies.
I’ve seen them used for traffic routing, storage system metadata systems, distributed cache etc
Sharded in-memory caching turns out to be rather useful at scale :)
Some of the key examples highlighted on our blog are Unity Catalog, which is essentially the metadata layer for Databricks, our Query Orchestration Engine, and our distributed remote cache. See the blog post for more!
Author of the post here - this has been a trend that seems to be taking hold as platform organizations are evolving. I've seen a trend where edicts come down on high, but the engineering leader never tried the flow.
What are some use cases that you found are useful?