Actor systems. Actor systems allow this to scale and cross the machine boundary without having some dedicated database product doing it for us. I've noticed t

Actor systems. Actor systems allow this to scale and cross the machine boundary without having some dedicated database product doing it for us. I've noticed that the more I work with actor systems (each actor is stateful and keeps its own state), the less I use databases. In fact, the idea of keep state separate from the code reading it and changing it begins to look oddly broken as a concept.