With over 34 years of experience architecting and building SaaS applications, Lee Atchison is a recognized expert on application modernization, cloud migration, and DevOps transformations. As the popularity of an application grows, operation costs can skyrocket, and the app may crash or experience slow speeds, prompting the need for an application cache to minimize these issues and ensure high performance. A cache provides real-time access to data, minimizing the need for repeated requests to primary data stores, and Lee Atchison emphasizes that modern applications must be able to handle large quantities of data, perform complex operations, and maintain numerous relationships among data elements to meet customer expectations. Caching can help improve application architectures by reducing resource and time intensive operations, providing faster and more efficient data access, and increasing overall performance, but it requires a good understanding of the statistical distribution of data access from the application or data source to be effective.