From what I could tell, its tikv is virtually useless without the rest of the tidb (the MySQL layer that sits on top written in go) to be useful.

TiKV has no replication / sharding built in, that is actually handled by a Placement Driver (PD)

From the docs: > TiKV is a component in the TiDB project, you must build and run it with TiDB and PD together.