Caching has been an essential strategy for greater performance in computing since the beginning of the field. Nearly all applications have data access patterns that make caching an attractive technique, but caching also has hidden trade-offs related to concurrency, memory usage, and latency.

As we build larger distributed systems, caching continues to be a critical technique for building scalable, high-throughput, low-latency applications. Large systems tend to magnify the caching trade-offs and have created new approaches to distributed caching. There are unique challenges in testing systems like these as well.

Ehcache and Terracotta provide a unique way to start with simple caching for a small system and grow that system over time with a consistent API while maintaining low-latency, high-throughput caching.