You can increase your application performance significantly by adding a cache layer. In a cache proxy pattern, static content or dynamic content is cached upstream of the web app server. As shown in the following architectural diagram, you have a caching layer in front of the web application cluster:

In the preceding diagram, for high-performance delivery, cache content is delivered by the cache server. A few benefits of cache proxy patterns are as follows:

• Cache proxy patterns help you to deliver content using the cache, which means no modification is needed at the web server or application server level.
• They reduce the load of content generation for dynamic content in particular.
• You have the flexibility to set up a cache at the browser level such as in HTTP headers, URLs, cookies, and more. Alternatively, you can cache information in the cache layer if you don't want to store it at the browser level.

In the cache proxy pattern, you need to make sure that you maintain multiple copies of the cache to avoid the single point of failure. Sometimes, you may want to serve your static content from both the server and CDN, each of which requires a different approach. Let's deep dive into this hybrid situation in the next section.