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Worka Anvil

Worka Anvil is an open-source distributed storage and compute system designed for simplicity, scalability, and future extensibility.

The goal is to provide a system that can start small --- a single-node instance that fits into a Docker Compose file --- and scale seamlessly to thousands of peers and millions of clients. Anvil is built in Rust 2024 edition, using Postgres 17 for metadata indexing, and QUIC for high-performance peer-to-peer networking.

What makes Anvil unique is that it isn't just about storage. From the beginning, we also design for a world where peers can register compute capabilities. Whether that's machine learning inference, data processing, or other compute-heavy tasks, Anvil treats compute as a first-class citizen alongside storage.

How Anvil differs from others​

  • Operational simplicity: only two moving parts --- Postgres and the Anvil binary.
  • Scale from one node to many: a single-node deployment grows naturally into a distributed cluster without re-architecture.
  • Compute + storage unified: peers can be storage-only, compute-only, or both.
  • Modern networking: QUIC is the foundation, avoiding TCP/TLS complexities.
  • Postgres as metadata index: rich queries via ltree, pg_trgm, and JSONB enable more than prefix-based lookups.