Exactly! Accessing data in RAM will be orders of magnitude faster than over the network (maybe this is a good sanity check of our benchmark numbers). The core principle behind IKV is that it allows you to access (large) data-sets without network calls.

Most DB tooling out there only works for a client-server model.

And implementing the Redis protocol would imply changing our architecture significantly and negatively affect performance (ex. a producer-consumer queue to serve requests, ser-deserialization costs).