I think the unique idea here is supposed to be QuePaxa's idea of avoiding timeouts for ensuring liveness. The actual discussion of QuePaxa is limited to one paragraph at the end, and tbh only a couple sentences of that paragraph.
I feel like the article could've been titled "Consensus protocols and linearizability: a brief explainer", or "Paxos vs Raft", or similar. It just doesn't feel like it communicates what it claims to communicate, and is a bit confused on who its audience is, just IMO.
Which would also be a good read, but this article also isn't that. It doesn't discuss their experience deploying the protocol, aside from the following statement:
> Meerkat is not deployed to production, but we have run multiple proofs-of-concept with up to 50 replicas distributed around the world, to great success. Leaders in our proof-of-concept clusters constantly fail, and the cluster keeps operating with no increase in error-rate.
I think it would've been more interesting to read why Cloudflare chose the specific algorithm they did, see an example of a pathological but common situation Cloudflare sees at their scale that makes other protocols unsuitable for them, therefore they made X choice and this led to Y gains in production (or on dummy workloads, or whatever). As it stands, there's nothing here actually specific to Cloudflare's workload or deployment. It doesn't even state their use-case beyond "small pieces of control plane state (e.g., leadership for replicated databases)"
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 likely suitable for eg databases.
* they talk about formal verification, which is good and feels appropriate.
Looking forward to seeing more!
Who else than Cloudflare (or similar company in expertise and size) would be a better fit to implement distributed consensus?
ebeirne•1h ago