Fundamentals of Software Architecture

Space-based architecture gets its name from the concept of tuple space, the technique of using multiple parallel processors communicating through shared memory. High scalability, high elasticity, and high performance are achieved by removing the central database as a synchronous constraint in the system and instead leveraging replicated in-memory data grids. Application data is kept in-memory and replicated among all the active processing units. When a processing unit updates data, it asynchronously sends that data to the database, usually via messaging with persistent queues. Processing units start up and shut down dynamically as user load increases and decreases, thereby addressing variable scalability. Because there is no central database involved in the standard transactional processing of the application, the database bottleneck is removed, thus providing near-infinite scalability within the application.