We have seen that Hazelcast isn't a closed technology, while it draws from its own Java-centric background, and is best placed to support applications based on that stack; it does allow more generic access to the cluster's data. Inspired by other standards and conventions already present in the wider community, Hazelcast has avoided completely reinventing the wheel and has found an ideal mix to complement its own offering but also allow existing applications to migrate across easily.

In the next chapter we shall look at taking our application into the cloud and the differences when deploying on a public cloud infrastructure.