ANA is a project to provide easy distributed data storage for stuff. It provides every object with a UUID and, when pickled, will first serialize the object's state to a central location and then "pickle" the object into just its UUID. This is really handy when you have to distribute objects in some distributed system, and you'd rather not pickle the whole object every time you need to send it.

ANA violates some of pickle's assumptions. Users of pickle often have an implicit assumption that the objects they unpickle will be different (identity-wise) than the objects that they pickle. This is not the case with ANA; in fact, it has an object cache specifically to avoid this. Furthermore, depending on the mode of operation, ANA might store the objects centrally, by UUID, where it will be accessed by other instances of ANA. Because of these things, the objects serialized with ANA should be immutable, if you know what's good for you.