Most of these things are pretty easy in elixir phoenix... And the tradeoff is that if you are sending gobs of http and also doing a fresh db query each time, it's wasteful and can possibly hurt latency too; phoenix tries to solve that. Conceptually one way you can think of it is that it's just a "smarter (in the feature sense, not necessarily the access-optimized sense) cache layer" in front of your DB.