Cloudflare Introduces Meerkat for Strongly Consistent Global Coordination
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New consensus algorithm from Cloudflare, highly technical and relevant to distributed systems.
Cloudflare introduced Meerkat, a globally consistent control-plane service based on the QuePaxa consensus algorithm, which enables leaderless writes and eliminates availability loss from leader timeouts in wide-area networks. Unlike Raft, Meerkat allows all replicas to accept writes without relying on timeouts, achieving linearizable reads and writes through a globally replicated consensus log. It is expected to be the first production deployment of QuePaxa at global scale, though it incurs one to three round trips per proposal and is not designed for general-purpose databases.