The problem with this design had nothing to do with the functional behavior. Functionally, RemoteAvailabilityCache was a nice piece of work. In times of stress, however, it had a nasty failure mode. The inventory system was undersized (see Antipattern 4.8, Unbalanced Capacities), so when the front end got busy, the back end would be flooded with requests. Eventually, it crashed. At that point, any thread calling RemoteAvailabilityCache.get would block, because one single thread was inside the create call, waiting for a response that would never come.
