Cloudflare Research is building Meerkat, an experimental global consensus service powered by QuePaxa — a 2023 EPFL consensus algorithm designed to avoid the leader-timeout problems that plague Raft in wide-area networks. Unlike Raft, QuePaxa allows any replica to drive consensus at any time, eliminating single points of failure and leader election storms. Meerkat exposes a consensus log on which applications like a linearizable key-value store and distributed leasing system are built. The post explains the consistency (linearizability) and fault-tolerance requirements, details how the slot-based log works, and contrasts QuePaxa's leaderless design with Raft's authoritative-leader model. Proof-of-concept clusters with up to 50 globally distributed replicas have run successfully with constant leader failures causing zero increase in error rate. Meerkat is currently internal-only and targets infrequently written control-plane state; future posts will cover QuePaxa internals, formal verification of the Rust implementation, deterministic simulation testing, and optimal replica placement.
