Different applications might have different requirements for interacting with the grid, some applications might require on-demand loading from an external data source; others use it for read-mostly purposes; some can need transactional support others need a data grid that handles both write and read operations. Infinispan can be configured to behave in different ways, depending upon how it is configured. These ways are called Caching Modes, and determine which strategy will be used to manage Infinispan objects within machines that are designated as the cluster members.

Infinispan uses the JGroups library to provide network communication capabilities. JGroups is a toolkit for reliable group communication and provides many useful features and enables cluster node discovery, point-to-point and point-to-multipoint communication, failure detection, and data transfer between cluster nodes.

You will learn more about JGroups in Chapter 11, An Introduction to JGroups.