Innesto: a multi-attribute searchable consistent key/value store.

Key/value data storage systems serve as the fundamental component of scalable cloud-based services. However, the scalability of existing key/value datastores comes at the cost of a narrow data access API with relaxed data consistency. We present Innesto, a distributed key/value datastore that provides search as part of its API. Search allows data items to be retrieved based on constraints on multiple different attributes. Innesto’s strong consistency data model and its transactional interface bring much of the power of traditional relational databases to cloud-scale performance. Isolation between transactions can be performed using either traditional locks or using lock-free synchronisation based on clock vectors. Our evaluation of Innesto shows that it offers these extra features with competitive performance compared to an industrial key/value datastore such as Cassandra which offers an inferior feature set.