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The important thing to note is that the Node will ALWAYS append a copy (either virtual if it's part of the old keys or hard if it's passed in during an insert) of the keys to the end of the Buffer. This provides two useful properties. The first is that the contents of any pointer (such as a secondary key pointer) returned by the node during its lifetime will remain valid during its lifetime, even if the entry has been 'erased'. Here lifetime means from the time that the local copy is created/read from RAMCloud to the time that the local copy is garbage collected. The second useful property is this allows multiple nodes to be use the same buffer, saving on stack space. So it is also not uncommon to see a buffer layout such as
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