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Global Consensus Service

1 post · Jul 2026

What this trail covers

Cloudflare is developing Meerkat, an experimental global consensus service powered by the QuePaxa algorithm. This service aims to provide strongly consistent and highly available control-plane state management across its distributed data centers, overcoming limitations of traditional leader-based consensus algorithms like Raft in wide-area networks. Meerkat will initially manage small pieces of control plane state, such as leadership for replicated databases, and will be kept internal-only.

All Cloudflare trails
  1. Introducing Meerkat- an experiment in global consensusThis post introduces Meerkat, an experimental global consensus service built on the QuePaxa algorithm. It details the requirements for a global control-plane data system, emphasizing strong consistency (linearizability) and fault tolerance (availability as long as a majority of machines are alive and can communicate, and correctness without Byzantine faults). It explains Meerkat's architecture, which uses a log of events distributed via a consensus algorithm, and how this log enables linearizability. The post contrasts QuePaxa with Raft, highlighting QuePaxa's ability for all replicas to perform writes at all times and its resilience to timeouts, making it suitable for Cloudflare's unpredictable network.