Inventive aspects include a method, apparatus, and system for supporting a native key-value distributed storage system. The system includes a namenode having a KV-SSD and one or more datanodes each including one or more KV-SSDs. The system includes a client device that is communicatively coupled to the namenode and the one or more datanodes. The client device includes a native key-value storage and networking stack. Some embodiments include a hybrid block-based native key-value distributed storage system that supports both block-based files and native key-value tuples.