Cloudflare introduces Meerkat: a global consensus service using the QuePaxa algorithm

James LarischBob HalleyJoão Pedro Leite

3h ago· 17 min readenInsight

technology programming distributed systems cloud infrastructure

Summary

Cloudflare Research introduces Meerkat, a global consensus service built on a new algorithm called QuePaxa. Meerkat is designed to enable strongly consistent, fault-tolerant state management across Cloudflare's 330+ global data centers, addressing the challenges of operating distributed systems over the unpredictable Internet. The service aims to guarantee that different readers never see inconsistent state and that writes remain available even when data centers or network links fail. Cloudflare plans to use Meerkat to build a strongly consistent, fault-tolerant key-value store and other applications.

Source

Hacker NewsCloudflare introduces Meerkat: a global consensus service using the QuePaxa algorithmblog.cloudflare.com

Key quotes

· 5 pulled

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.

But Cloudflare's network runs across the entire Internet, and the Internet is an unpredictable place.

Servers and data centers go down. Queues fill up. Links and cables get cut.

These conditions make it difficult to run a globally available data system that guarantees strong consistency.

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Cloudflare Research is building a global consensus service called Meerkat that uses a new consensus algorithm called QuePaxa. We plan to use Meerkat to build a strongly consistent, fault-tolerant key-value store, and other applications.

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