What have they really built: a purely in-memory KV store that doesn't support synchronous secondary writes for durability. So, any comparisons with ACID KV stores, either disk based (Cassandra, Mongo) or in-memory, are not apples-to-apples comparisons from the beginning. What could be production applications of such system, other than cache?
On their benchmarks: they don't really compare with state of the art.
Selection of competitors in the single-server, multi-core benchmark doesn't include systems like https://github.com/fastio/pedis. Also, they still use 100 millisecond granularity of gossip (within a single server!), while for all other compared systems corresponding metric could be evaluated as nearly 0 by construction, that gives Anna a huge edge.
In multi-node benchmark, they claim 10x over Cassandra. ScyllaDB (https://www.scylladb.com/) claims the same, while being ACID and linearizable, unlike Anna. Also, Anna achieves stronger consistency levels by holding off reads, that kills latency, given 100 millisecond gossip granularity. If it applies only to their multi-key consistency (Read Committed/Uncommitted) it's probably OK, because I suppose that there is no magic bullet that allows to preserve super low latencies and providing similar consistency in Scylla either. But if Anna needs to hold off reads for any of their claimed single-key consistency levels (all of which are weaker than linearizable), that's worse than Scylla. The authors of the paper didn't detail the algorithm for each consistency level.
Seems like the authors don't benchmark multi-node scalability of Anna on any consistency levels except the weakest, simple eventual consistency. It would be interesting to see if Anna scales as well on stronger consistency levels.
To me, the main outcome of this paper is another confirmation that shared-nothing, thread-per-core, message passing designs are beneficial in the modern computing environment. This is not new, however, see H-Store, Scylla/Seastar, Tarantool (https://github.com/tarantool/tarantool), Aeron (https://github.com/real-logic/aeron), Tempesta (https://github.com/tempesta-tech/tempesta), etc.
Novelty is the framework that generalizes thread/node scalability, different consistency levels reusing the same codebase, and having just a single knob - gossip granularity. Practical applications are limited. Certain techniques are probably going to be cherry-picked by systems such as Redis Cluster and In-Memory Data Grids.