  The programmability of modern network devices has led to innovative research
in the area of in-network computing, i.e., offloading certain computations to
the programmable data plane. Key-value stores, which offer coordination
services for many large-scale data centres, benefited from this technological
advancement. Previous research reduced the response latency of key-value
requests by half through deploying the store in the programmable data plane. In
this work, we identify previous design decisions that have led to increased
traffic generation and latency for in-network coordination services. We have
developed a new in-network key-value store platform that maintains strong
consistency and fault-tolerance, while improving performance and scalability
over the state-of-the-art. We have designed and implemented the platform in P4,
and analysed the optimisations that unlock these performance improvements. Our
evaluation shows a reduction of up to orders of magnitude in latency and
significant improvements in throughput. We obtain up to nine times higher
throughput for scenarios with multiple participating nodes, indicative of the
superior scalability the platform can offer.
