You are working on optimizing a Spring Boot application that has heavy read operations. How would you design the caching mechanism to ensure data consistency while minimizing the load on the underlying data store?

In scenarios with heavy read operations and the need for data consistency, the cache-aside pattern with a distributed cache system is a suitable choice. It allows you to read data from cache when available, update it when necessary, and minimize load on the data store. Time-based cache eviction, write-through caching, and LRU policies may be applicable in different contexts but do not directly address the data consistency concern.