Cloudflare details Meerkat, a global consensus service built on QuePaxa

Category: Infrastructure
Status: confirmed
Sources: Cloudflare blog, HN discussion
Summary: Cloudflare published on 2026-07-08 an introduction to Meerkat, a global consensus service that keeps control-plane state consistent across its 330-plus datacenters as a strongly consistent, fault-tolerant key-value store. Meerkat implements QuePaxa, a 2023 consensus algorithm from EPFL researchers, which Cloudflare states is its first industrial deployment at global scale. Unlike Raft, QuePaxa runs without a required leader, lets all replicas propose writes concurrently, and does not stall on timeouts, which Cloudflare frames as removing the "tyranny of timeouts" that slows Raft on wide-area networks. Cloudflare reports about 10 times higher throughput than Raft under adverse network conditions, tests with up to 50 globally distributed replicas, and 1 to 3 or more round trips per consensus decision. Meerkat is described as experimental and internal-only for now, and is not open source.
Why it matters: A production deployment of a leaderless, timeout-free consensus protocol at global scale is a concrete data point for teams weighing Raft alternatives for wide-area strongly consistent state.