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Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus

#21

Post by proofofcontempt »

buremba wrote: post #16
m11a wrote: post #3

This article is a bit hard for me to grasp the main ideas of because, given Cloudflare's requirements (e.g. no strong leaders), it immediately seems like they should be comparing to leaderless protocols like Paxos-class algorithms. Comparing to Raft and saying it's better because Meerkat is leaderless is confusing, because Raft is an adjustment to Paxos to specifically have strong leaders. So I'm 3/4 the way into the…

It feels like somebody prompted an AI agent at CF "why Meerkat is better than Raft" when drafting this blog post.

Every cloudflare blog post that gets posted on here shares that quality now

Re: Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus

#22

Post by throwaway894345 »

nunez wrote: post #20

This is really interesting. I wonder if etcd can benefit from this as it uses Raft for consensus and split-brain can be a problem depending on how its setup (usually when a Kubernetes control plane is initialized).

Yeah, for real. etcd is one of the biggest limitations to Kubernetes in my opinion. I would love to have a region-agnostic Kubernetes cluster.

Re: Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus

#23

Post by throwaway894345 »

michaelmior wrote: post #7
pstoll wrote: post #4

TBH I’m doubtful of most people building their own crypto libs and distributed consensus implementations. But maybe cloudflare can pull it off. Good to see them pushing the state of distributed consensus. Take aways: * it’s not in prod yet. I suspect those many round trips are going to get expensive on median aka typical redistributed deployments. Curious to see how it goes once in the wild. * they say it isn’t likel…

Cloudflare did not develop QuePaxa, although I'm sure they did a lot of work to operationalize it. The original protocol is from a SOSP 2023 paper. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3600006.3613150

The parent's claim was that Cloudflare is _implementing_ QuePaxa, not developing it, for whatever it's worth.

Re: Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus

#24

Post by throwaway894345 »

s8kur wrote: post #9

Consensus is one of those areas where the interesting engineering and the number of people who actually need it are inversely correlated. Most "we need distributed coordination" turns out to be "we need one writer and a lock," which a single Postgres hands you for free: advisory locks, SELECT ... FOR UPDATE, SKIP LOCKED for work distribution. Linearizability without running Raft.. The real threshold is multi-region w…

> Most "we need distributed coordination" turns out to be "we need one writer and a lock," which a single Postgres hands you for free

1. This article is about Cloudflare developing for their own internal control plane--I'm fairly certain their requirements preclude a single Postgres

2. Even if you're not Cloudflare, you may not want to be limited by the availability of a single Postgres instance.

Re: Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus

#25

Post by 1bpp »

greengreengrass wrote: post #17
buremba wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like somebody prompted an AI agent at CF "why Meerkat is better than Raft" when drafting this blog post.

The article lets itself down when it reveals it's had some marketing "polish" added: "where certain resources (like an AI model instance) are stored" They could have picked something far more concrete (for Cloudflare's business and the type of services they deploy) than "AI model" there, which is clearly picked just to make it seem 'current' and on-trend.

That, or the model writing it already had "You are an AI model instance" sitting at the beginning of its context ready to pull from. Telling it it's an AI pushes it to make text about AI.

Re: Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus

#26

Post by snthpy »

"a new distributed consensus service called Meerkat powered by a consensus algorithm called QuePaxa, published in 2023 by researchers at EPFL. QuePaxa differs from Raft in that all replicas can perform writes at all times, and progress is never halted due to a timeout"

Interesting

Re: Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus

#27

Post by nano_o »

What's interesting here is that this would be the first production implementation of an asynchronous consensus algorithm (QuePaxa). Paxos, Raft, etc. are all partially synchronous, meaning they rely on timeouts and only make progress if message delay is sufficiently small compared to timeout durations. QuePaxa doesn't rely on timeouts and makes progress even under wild fluctuations in message delay. The question is whether performance is competitive enough in the normal case, when message delay is small and doesn't vary much, and historically the answer has been "no" and that's why asynchronous protocols weren't used.

Re: Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus

#29

Post by pyrolistical »

materielle wrote: post #13
williamdclt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m doubtful of most people building their own crypto libs and distributed consensus implementations. But maybe cloudflare can pull it off. Who else than Cloudflare (or similar company in expertise and size) would be a better fit to implement distributed consensus?

There’s a weird yet common attitude that nobody has to implement operating systems, databases, compilers, cryptography, consensus algorithms, etc because you should use off the shelf solutions. This is obviously true, and there are surely more web devs than, say, compiler engineers. But then the logic seems to go as far as to imply nobody does or should be doing these things. Where do they think the “off the shelf” s…

I predict we may be heading back to self implementations based off of papers since it is now cheaper to do so with AI coding agents.

Yeah they kinda suck and make mistakes right now, but tech only gets better.

It’s no different than 3D printing. Instead of cutting and joining a bunch of stock parts, you just print the desired part.

In the same way printing with plastic kinda sucks, the tech will improve. Now you can print in metal or in resin without supports.

The future will be take all the ideas from various off the shelf products but tightly integrate them together for my specific use case

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