Introducing Meerkat: an experiment in global consensus

Cloudflare has developed Meerkat, an experimental distributed consensus service designed to manage control-plane state across its global data centers. Unlike traditional consensus algorithms like Raft, which can suffer from leader failures and timeouts, Meerkat utilizes the QuePaxa algorithm. This allows all replicas to perform writes simultaneously and ensures continuous availability even during network disruptions, making it suitable for Cloudflare's expansive and unpredictable network infrastructure.