Chapter 1. What is Hazelcast?

Most, if not all, applications need to store some data—some applications far more than others. By holding this book in your hands and eagerly flipping through its pages, it might be safe to assume that you have previously architected, developed, or supported applications more towards the latter end of that scale. We can also take it as given that you are all too painfully familiar with the common pitfalls and issues that tend to crop up when scaling or distributing a data layer. However, to make sure that we are all up to speed, in this chapter, we shall examine the following topics:

• Traditional approaches towards data persistence
• How caches help improve performance but come with their own problems
• Hazelcast's fresh approach towards the problem
• A brief overview of the generic capabilities of Hazelcast
• The type of problems that we can solve using Hazelcast