Speed Kit: A Polyglot & GDPR-Compliant Approach For Caching Personalized Content

Abstract

Users leave when page loads take too long. This simple fact has complex implications for virtually all modern businesses, because accelerating content delivery through caching is not as simple as it used to be. As a fundamental technical challenge, the high degree of personalization in today’s Web has seemingly outgrown the capabilities of traditional content delivery networks (CDNs) which have been designed for distributing static assets under fixed caching times. As an additional legal challenge for services with personalized content, an increasing number of regional data protection laws constrain the ways in which CDNs can be used in the first place. In this paper, we present Speed Kit as a radically different approach for content distribution that combines (1) a polyglot architecture for efficiently caching personalized content with (2) a natively GDPR-compliant client proxy that handles all sensitive information within the user device. We describe the system design and implementation, explain the custom cache coherence protocol to avoid data staleness and achieve Δ-atomicity, and we share field experiences from over a year of productive use in the e-commerce industry.