What would it take to build a key-value store that would excel across many orders of magnitude of scale, from a single multicore box to the global cloud?
The paper includes numbers showing it beating Redis by over 10x on a single AWS instance, and beating Cassandra by 10x across the globe on a standard interactive benchmark.
Anna gets its performance and its scalability from its fully coordination-free implementation of simple actors with private state, which only communicate† via background gossip.
The state of each Anna actor is a monotone lattice composition. Anna is the first system to offer all these consistency levels [causal consistency, read-committed], and the various choices differ in only a couple dozen lines of C++ each.
