As an important application of acceleration in the cloud, the distributed caching technology has received considerable attention in industry and academia. This paper starts with a discussion on the combination of cloud computing and distributed caching technology, giving an analysis of its characteristics, typical application scenarios, stages of development, standards, and several key elements, which have promoted its development. In order to systematically know the state of art progress and weak points of the distributed caching technology, the paper builds a multi-dimensional framework, DctAF. This framework is constituted of 6 dimensions through analyzing the characteristics of cloud computing and boundary of the caching techniques. Based on DctAF, current techniques have been analyzed and summarized; comparisons among several influential products have also been made. Finally, the paper describes and highlights the several challenges that the cache system faces and examines the current research through in-depth analysis and comparison.