Kanzi: A Distributed, In-memory Key-Value Store

Traditional database systems either sacrifice availability or partitionability at the cost of offering strict consistency guarantee of data. However, the significant growth of Web-scale applications and the wider array of emerging workloads demand revisiting the need for full transactional consistency. One new dominant class of workload is the ability to efficiently support single statement transaction consisting of either Get or Put operation; thus, simplifying the consistency model. These simple workloads have given rise to decade-long efforts for building efficient key-value stores that often rely on disk-resident and log-structured storage model that is distributed across many machines. To further expand the scope of key-value stores, in this paper, we introduce Kanzi, a distributed, in-memory key-value stored over shared-memory architecture enabled by remote direct memory access (RDMA) technology. The simple data and transaction model of our proposed Kanzi additionally may serve as a generic (embedded) caching layer to speed up any disk-resident data-intensive workloads.