How would the players recognize that i-cache is in?
TL;DRPlayers should notice better response times and fault tolerance whenever the game touches persistent data, such as spawning ships, changing loadouts, purchasing or cargo, plus fewer failures during big events or when a service goes down.
So I would say that some of the most apparent changes that will come about is that we're going to have both a combination of better response on server and service queries for this kind of persistent data, as well as better fault tolerance and scalability. What that will directly manifest as: all the different times in the game where you end up interacting with these databases, which is constantly, it'll be things like when you spawn a ship, whenever you change your loadout, so your helmet or your armor, whenever you change something about your vehicles, whenever you purchase something, whenever you deal with cargo, there's all these places in the game where you're interacting with the persistent state of the game. And in all those places, right now we're struggling both with scaling to support the number of players that we want, especially whenever we have a big event or new release, we're really pushing on the current infrastructure that we have. But on top of it, it'll make it more fault tolerant so that whenever inevitably something goes wrong, the game just doesn't fall over. With the current, what we call the monolithic PCache that we have, if that service goes down, that's just it for all persistence queries for the entire, not just server, but all the servers. So this is clearly not the right place to be. But this new set of services addresses that by not putting all your eggs in one basket, as it were, and allowing for a multiplicity of handlers to be able to react to any requests.