All heap and nowhere to go

One thing that we may have noticed with all the examples that we have been working on so far is that as we are running Hazelcast in an embedded mode, each of the JVM instances will both provide the application's functionality and house the data storage. Hence, the persisted cluster data is held within a heap of the various nodes, and this means that we will need to control the provisioned heap sizes more accurately, as it is now more than just a non-functional advantage to have more; that is, size matters.

However, depending on the type of application that we are developing, it may not be convenient or suitable to directly use the application's heap for storing data. A pertinent example of this situation would be a web application, particularly one that runs in a potentially shared web application container (for example, Apache Tomcat).

This would be rather unsuitable for storing extensive amounts of data within a heap, as our application's storage requirements would...