Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus
Cloudflare has developed a new distributed consensus service called Meerkat, powered by the QuePaxa algorithm, to manage control-plane state across its global network. This system aims to overcome the limitations of traditional consensus algorithms like Raft, which struggle with wide-area network latency and leader availability.
Why it matters
Improving distributed consensus is vital for the reliability of global internet infrastructure, ensuring services remain consistent and available despite network failures.
Many internal services at Cloudflare need to read and modify the same control-plane state from across our 330+ global data centers. They need guarantees that different readers never see inconsistent state, and that the system remains available for writes even when some data centers or links fail.
The article is a technical explanation of a software engineering solution.
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