This week in caching: tiered cache / origin shield

This week in caching: tiered cache / origin shield

What adding a mid-tier between edge and origin did:

— Video platform — enabling origin shield meant 200 edge POPs pulled from one shield region instead of all hitting origin; origin fill requests dropped 92% and bandwidth bill followed.
— News site — tiered cache turned a cold-cache spike after publish into a single origin fetch fanned out to the edge, instead of dozens of simultaneous misses.
— API — shield in the same region as origin cut cross-continent backhaul, dropping cache-miss latency from 280ms to 40ms.

The idea: without a shield, every edge POP is a separate cache that all stampede your origin on a miss. The shield collapses that to one.

Bookmark: Cloudflare 'Tiered Cache' / Fastly 'shielding' docs — flip it on, watch origin requests fall.