This is... EJBs. It is probably less painful to use, but the model is pretty much the same. Fascinating.
I was thinking of the EJB 1 & 2 era xml wiring of all the things.
the ejb3 caching was so efficient that we really only needed one server, we just had the other two as backup so that we could do CI driven rolling deploys integrated with the load balancer. we used jgroups mcast to expire entities in the cache. jvms were carefully monitored and all the settings were heavily tuned for our environment.
the hardest thing about all of it was simply packaging it all up into a war file correctly. it is all knowledge that i've long since forgotten how to do.