Cache-Control: the silent hero in communication between services

When people talk about performance, scalability, or even costs, they usually jump straight to: bigger machines more replicas faster databases more complex architectures But there’s one HTTP detail that is almost always underestimated and, at the same time, insanely powerful: 👉 Cache-Control If you work with communication between different apps (frontend ↔ backend, backend ↔ backend, BFFs, APIs, gateways, etc.), understanding cache-control can save you latency, money, and a lot of pain . The problem we usually ignore In many systems, requests look like this: App A calls App B App B calls App C App C hits a database or an external API And this happens all the time , even when: the data barely changes the response is identical for minutes (or hours) thousands of users are requesting the same thing So we end up doing: repeated network calls repeated serialization/deserialization repeated DB reads All for the same response. That’s not just inefficient — it’s unnecessary. Where Cache-Control