Scaling Data Services with Pivotal GemFire

Chapter 2. Cluster Design and Distributed Concepts

Mike Stolz

The Distributed System

Typically, a GemFire distributed system consists of any number of members that are connected to one another in a peer-to-peer fashion, such that each member is aware of the availability of every other member at any time. It is called a distributed system because the members of the cluster are distributed across many servers in order to provide high availability and horizontal scalability. Figure 2-1 shows a typical GemFire setup.

Figure 2-1. A common GemFire deployment

Cache

The Cache is the base abstraction of GemFire. It is the entry point to the entire system. Think of it as the place to define all the storage for the data you will put into the system. In some ways it is similar to the construct of “database” in the relational world. There is also a notion of a cache on the clients connected to the GemFire distributed system. We refer to this as a ClientCache. We usually recommend that this ClientCache be configured to be kept up-to-date automatically as data changes in the server-side cache.

Regions

Regions are similar to tables in a traditional database. They are the container for all data stored in GemFire. They provide the APIs that you put data into and retrieve data from GemFire. The Region API also provides many of the quality-of-service capabilities for data stored in GemFire ...