Cache is the author's best friend for several reasons: it provides speed, reduces costs, improves customer patience through faster responses, enables distributed solutions, accommodates future growth, and makes engineers smarter. Cache is a component that stores frequently used data to improve speed by retrieving the data more quickly than accessing the original source. There are different types of caches including software, in-network, and hardware caches that operate using various policies like write-through and write-back. Popular caching areas include CDNs, databases, clients, web pages, and applications.