Early last year I was working on an application that kept data in a near cache. I will not delve into reasons why we used near cache other than that we had strict performance requirements that required data closer to the compute.
Near cache for those who have not heard this term is a smaller local(in the same process as your application) cache that stores most recently used or most frequently accessed data. So, if you are running a Java application near cache could be as simple as a ConcurrentHashMap or you can use libraries like Cache2k or Caffeine to implement a near cache.
You can read the complete post on Xebia Engineering Medium publication.
Shekhar Gulati 