Caching is used to optimize performance by taking advantage of different access speeds of storage mediums. It stores frequently accessed data in faster storage like memory or disk cache. There are different types of caches like browser cache, server cache using memcached, and cache within a request. Memcached is mainly used for read-through caching but has issues like requiring separate deployment and CAS operations. GroupCache is an alternative that avoids duplicated calls to the backend and has better performance without network IO or CAS. Write-through caching aims to have zero reads from the backend but is challenging to implement transactionally at scale.