Introducing Cachai
From Kubernetes to Blockchain, distributed systems have become an integral part of enterprise IT and the foundation for innovative new products. When implemented well, this kind of system promises unparalleled resilience, efficiency, trustworthiness, and scalability.
Yet, implementing and maintaining distributed systems to meet enterprise expectations remains a daunting challenge. Software Engineers often struggle to understand and master this skill set, and enterprises often choose to “move it all to the cloud” in order to avoid the trouble and cost of “upskilling” in a scarce talent market. This monopolizes distributed systems capabilities, because the hyperscale cloud companies employ most of the talent that can create these systems. Public Cloud is always more expensive than DIY, especially for enterprise customers, but there’s not enough DIY expertise to go around. And when Azure sneezes, their customers all catch a cold at the same time.
How can it be that the global economy depends on company-specific infrastructure that breaks without constant attention from some of the most talented engineers in the world? Why are these folks spending their time fixing configuration and state management problems instead of focused on revenue-generating innovations? We find this situation shocking, and we’re on a mission to fix it.
Cachai Makes Distributed Systems Easy
Cachai is an enterprise software appliance designed to address this critical capability gap in the world of distributed systems. Cachai automates elite expertise at the intersection of distributed systems, Web3 security, and network engineering into a plug & play solution that can create distributed systems anywhere. This replaces some of the most daunting and time-consuming elements of fine tuning, maintaining and scaling distributed systems.
Plenty of cloud enabling solutions add user interfaces and automations to higher layers of the stack, but Cachai is the first product that opens the real bottleneck: consensus-based state management.
Our mission is to democratize reliable, performant consensus-based state management for orchestration and other distributed system processes, solving a multibillion-dollar problem for enterprises and unlocking previously impossible innovations. Cachai combines universal queueing middleware and messaging layer innovations with executable software implemented on commodity hardware to isolate and optimize consensus-based processes in their native protocols.
Meet the Founding Team: Emma and Jesse Bates
Emma, Cachai’s Founder and CEO, first conceptualized this problem in the world of military modernization strategy. During her time at the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), Army Futures Command, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, she became more and more concerned about the gap between expectations and capabilities across seemingly disparate systems like drone swarming and Command & Control systems.
Jesse Bates, Cachai’s Co-Founder and CTO, has founded and exited his own startup, and brings expertise in network architecture and consensus-based distributed systems from 5 years of experience leading the Consensus initiative at high-performance computing firm Data Vortex Technologies. His visionary technical acumen has been instrumental in Cachai's product development and strategic direction.
Together, they connected the dots and identified a “horizontal” innovation opportunity where others only saw problem-solution sets for their own industry vertical. From supply chain tracking to drone swarming to automated chip design and credit card fraud prevention, distributed systems are indispensable, but they introduce the same painful tradeoffs because they are so difficult to implement and maintain. The current solutions are either monopolistic or piecemeal, bespoke, and limited in their capacity to scale. It is time for a cost-effective, easily reproduced product that bookends the solution to this problem for every industry, every company, every IT environment.
The Challenge of Distributed Systems
Computer systems can be either centralized (where one computer tells other computers what to do) or distributed (where multiple computers work together on the same problem at the same time.) Metaphorically speaking, a distributed system is to Google Docs as a centralized system is to document versions that live on hard drives and require version control processes for collaboration.
The process that enables distributed systems to “stay on the same page” and enable such collaboration is called Consensus. Consensus is an algorithm that’s widely used to enable computers to agree on the truth among several different actors before it is recorded in a database such as a key-value store. There are different variations that emphasize different priorities - for example, Cloud applications prioritize responsiveness while blockchain variations on consensus prioritize trustworthiness among untrustworthy participants. These variations exist because consensus involves inherent tradeoffs among consistency, availability, and recovery when networks or nodes fail.
This may seem more complicated than it’s worth, but consensus-based distribution is the foundation for all of the “cloud” characteristics we’ve come to expect from the applications and products we use every day: real-time collaboration, automatic update dissemination, trustworthy sequencing of events, swift content delivery anywhere in the world, all at prices that are accessible.
These only exist because of layers of distributed systems throughout IT infrastructure that create machine-speed resource allocation, auto-scaling, load-balancing, high availability, and more. All of those distributed systems depend on stateful databases, and the state management of those databases depend on the consensus algorithm. The consensus algorithm depends on proper network environment configuration and tuning that adapts with the growth and development of the many systems on top of it. That’s where Cachai comes in.
A Market-Ready Solution
Cachai is ready for diverse applications, from military drone orchestration to financial services analytics. This solution is secure-by-design, scalable, and easy to adopt with zero rip-and-replace required.
What is the impact of Cachai? While every scenario we find is unique, each has suffered from painful tradeoffs - sometimes uptime and performance are sacrificed, sometimes it’s the IT team’s well-being or the budget for new initiatives that suffers. Introducing Cachai relieves that tradeoff and returning your budget and flexibility to make the choices and investments that will grow your business - whether that’s bringing your workloads on-prem, deploying capability further to the edge, hybridizing your approach, or bringing new products to market.
Whether you need to manage supply chains, healthcare analytics, or sensitive data, Cachai offers a robust, enterprise-grade solution for trustworthy distributed systems you don’t have to worry about.
Join Us on the Journey
Cachai is not just a product; it's a movement towards a future where distributed systems are no longer a bottleneck but an accessible powerhouse of innovation and growth. Whether you’re an enterprise IT engineer or an innovator with a new idea you need distributed systems to enable, we invite you to join us on this journey.
Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to push the boundaries of what's possible in distributed systems.