Cloudflare Launches Experimental Global Consensus Service Meerkat
Cloudflare Blog · rss · 2026-07-08
Cloudflare introduced Meerkat, an experimental distributed consensus service designed to tackle the challenges of strong consistency and high availability for control plane data on a global scale.
- Pain Point: In Wide Area Networks (WANs), traditional Raft algorithms often suffer from leader timeouts caused by network fluctuations, leading to brief system unavailability.
- Meerkat & QuePaxa: Meerkat employs the QuePaxa consensus algorithm, allowing all replicas to accept writes at any time without relying on timeout mechanisms to keep the system running. This drastically improves fault tolerance in unstable network environments.
- Use Cases: Currently, Meerkat is primarily used to manage a small volume of control plane state (such as database leadership replication), providing linearizability and fault tolerance for Cloudflare's critical internal data.
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