Introducing Meerkat: Cloudflare’s Global Consensus Experiment
Meerkat enhances consistency and accessibility in distributed systems.
1Purpose of Meerkat
Cloudflare is developing the Meerkat project to ensure a consistent and accessible control plane across global data centers, aiming to make the system resilient to any disruptions.
2Global Data Challenges
Systems operating over the internet struggle with consistency due to outages and delays, posing a significant challenge for Cloudflare’s global network.
3Limitations of Raft Algorithm
Commonly used consensus algorithms like Raft rely on a leader-based approach, causing system unavailability during network outages.
4Innovation of QuePaxa
The QuePaxa algorithm allows all replicas to perform write operations and eliminates timeout issues, making it an ideal solution for Cloudflare’s network.
5Structure of Meerkat
Meerkat is a consensus service built on the QuePaxa algorithm, marking the first industrial application of QuePaxa at a global scale.
6Control Plane Data
Many Cloudflare services require reading and writing control plane data, which includes critical information for the system’s correct operation.
7Consistency Levels
Consistency levels in distributed systems determine how the system behaves during concurrent read and write operations. Cloudflare prefers the strongest consistency level, linearizability.
8Fault Tolerance
Meerkat is designed to be resilient to faults like network outages and machine crashes, ensuring continuous system availability.
9Key-Value Store
Meerkat runs applications like a key-value store on top of its consensus service, enhancing the system’s flexibility and usability.
10Next Steps
Meerkat is currently in development and will be used to manage small control plane data. Plans are in place to expand its use cases in the future.
11Industrial Application
Meerkat will be the first industrial application of the QuePaxa algorithm at a global scale, reinforcing Cloudflare’s technological leadership.
12Conclusion and Importance
Meerkat enhances consistency and accessibility in global distributed systems, making Cloudflare’s services more reliable. This project is a significant step for future technological advancements.
Original article: Cloudflare Blog — Cloudflare’ın Meerkat Projesi: Küresel Veri Tutarlılığı