- Cloudflare needs a distributed consensus service for global control-plane state management, ensuring strong consistency and availability despite network unpredictability.
- Raft-based systems suffer in wide-area networks due to leader dependency and timeout issues, leading to availability problems during leader failures or network degradation.
- Meerkat is Cloudflare's new consensus service using the QuePaxa algorithm, allowing all replicas to perform writes without timeouts, improving fault tolerance and availability.
- Meerkat guarantees linearizability for applications like a key-value store, ensuring all reads see prior writes even across distributed replicas, using a consensus log to synchronize events.