Anna: A KVS For Any Scale

This research paper introduces Anna, a key-value store (KVS) designed for scalable performance across diverse computing environments, from single multi-core machines to globally distributed cloud deployments. Anna achieves high performance and adaptability through a partitioned, multi-master architecture utilizing wait-free execution and coordination-free consistency. Its design is built upon coordination-free actors and lattice-based composite data structures, which allow for various consistency models and elastic scaling. The authors demonstrate that Anna effectively leverages multicore parallelism and scales smoothly, outperforming traditional KVS systems like Redis and Cassandra in specific scenarios while offering a wider range of consistency levels with minimal overhead. https://dsf.berkeley.edu/jmh/papers/anna_ieee18.pdf