Where To Use Terracotta

Terracotta helps simplify enterprise application development by providing a purpose-built infrastructure service called network attached memory.

Distributed Caches

Distributed caches powered by Terracotta can see as much as 100x throughput vs. native solutions, with no changes to existing code.

This is only possible because of Terracotta's unique JVM clustering approach, which can support any cache data structure, from java.util.HashMap, to EHCache, OSCache, or JBoss Cache.

Whether you are writing a new application, or need to scale out an existing application, and need to use a cache, Terracotta's DSO is simple and fast.

Hibernate

Hibernate is a simple, powerful solution for O/R mapping. While using Hibernate to access system-of-record data is easy and powerful, tuning and scaling such applications can be hard.

Terracotta helps to reduce database overload caused by O/R-mapped applications deployed in a clustered environment. Use it to cluster your Hibernate second level cache, or get even more performance by clustering disconnected Hibernate objects.

With EHCache as a second level cache, plug in Terracotta with just a few lines of configuration. The benefits are simplicity and manageability.

Looking for more performance? Get 10x or more scale with Terracotta and Hibernate in disconnected mode. With Terracotta, disconnected POJOs are durable while outside Hibernate's control. This means you won't lose any changes while disconnected from Hibernate, and you can easily reconnect your Session in the same node, or a different node, to flush the disconnected objects back to the database when you no longer need them.

HTTP Session Clustering

Terracotta is used by Java websites both large and small to cluster web sessions. When clustered by Terracotta, web application session becomes highly available without actually being replicated to every app server in the cluster. This leads to scalable applications especially when used in conjunction with an HTTP load balancer.

Virtual Heap for Large Datasets

With Terracotta, Java applications can address heap in excess of one machine's physical RAM. Your JVM can spill data to the Terracotta Server Cluster. The Terracotta Servers can, in turn, spill data to disk. This two-tier system ensures high performance by keeping data as close to the processing context as possible. It also makes it possible for 32 bit systems to access terabytes of data.

Cluster OSS Frameworks

Terracotta enables developers to build highly available, highly scalable applications with a variety of Open Source development frameworks, including some that do not have built-in high availability features.

Terracotta supports these frameworks because of the simplicity of Network Attached Memory. Direct framework support means that developers can rely on the integrated projects without having to integrate Terracotta by hand. More frameworks are coming online weekly.

We achieve this integration through Terracotta Integration Modules. You can use a module by simply downloading the appropriate module. You might also consider creating your own Integration Modules for bundles of code or clustered abstractions you wish to build for your own team.

Master Worker

Master - Worker is a design pattern that Terracotta users leverage to divide and route large workloads around a grid of JVMs.

To Deliver Master - Worker Terracotta uses both POJOs and frameworks hosted on our own project Forge.

POJO Clustering

Terracotta works with or without a container. Terracotta works with Open Source and proprietary frameworks. This is because Network Attached Memory works with the POJO's in those frameworks and it works the same for your own POJOs. No Spring beans, getters and setters, serialization, or other interfaces are required in order to use the technology.

Terracotta also supports Spring explicitly so when you decide to wire up your application using Spring's dependency injection, or when you start to use frameworks and abstractions like Spring Webflow, or Spring Batch you can cluster those applications without the need for RMI or Spring Remoting in your application.