As you can see, this is a technology that deals with many aspects of distribution, be it data persistence or computation. By using these capabilities in our architecture, we provide ourselves with a very simple scaling mechanism—just add more nodes. We scale up the multiple aspects of our application simultaneously. In this way, we should hopefully not introduce any scaling imbalances that might have been present if we had just scaled one aspect independently.

In the next chapter, we will look further into the world of big data and how we can analyze and bring multiple datasets together to extract hidden value from them with the help of the powerful MapReduce.