We discussed that a gateway is supposed to distribute the traffic. If it sends it to the same single point of contention, it is not very useful When requests are served from separate caches, the performance generally improves over what might have been incurred in going to the backend. That is why different proxy servers behind a gateway could maintain their own cache.  A dedicated cache service like AppFabric may also be sufficient to handle requests. In this case, we are consolidating proxy server caches with a dedicated cache. This does not necessarily mean a single point of contention. Shared services may offer at par service level agreement as an individual service for requests. Since a gateway will not see a performance degradation when sending to a proxy server or a shared dedicated cache, it works in both these cases. Replacing a shared dedicated cache with a shared dedicated storage such as an Object Storage is therefore also a practical option.
While gateway route requests, they could be replaced with a networking layer that enables a P2P network of different object storage which could be on-premise or in the cloud. A distributed hash table in this case determines the store to go to. The location information for the data objects is deterministic as the peers are chosen with identifiers corresponding to the data object's unique key. Content therefore goes to specified locations that makes subsequent requests easier. Unstructured P2P is composed of peers joining based on some rules and usually without any knowledge of the topology. In this case the query is broadcast and peers that have matching content return the data to the originating peer. This is useful for highly replicated items. P2P provides a good base for large scale data sharing. Some of the desirable features of P2P networks include selection of peers, redundant storage, efficient location, hierarchical namespaces, authentication as well as anonymity of users.  In terms of performance, the P2P has desirable properties such as efficient routing, self-organizing, massively scalable and robust in deployments, fault tolerance, load balancing and explicit notions of locality.  Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that the P2P is an overlay network with no restriction on size and there are two classes structured and unstructured. Structured P2P means that the network topology is tightly controlled and the content is placed on random peers and at specified location which will make subsequent requests more efficient.