1. A service architecture for large scale data processing, the service architecture comprising: a host computing system; a plurality of application containers executing on the host computing system, wherein each of the application containers comprises a large scale processing node running one or more java virtual machines; and a cache service that acts as a data retrieval intermediary between the plurality of application containers and at least one data repository, and is configured to identify data requests from the plurality of application containers in a first retrieval format, translate the data requests to a second retrieval format, and retrieve the requested data from the at least one data repository via the second retrieval format.