[michaelmior]

Worth noting if it wasn't obvious from the article that Cloudflare did not develop QuePaxa. It's from an SOSP paper back in 2023[0]. The article is discussing what is the first known large-scale public deployment of the protocol.

[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3600006.3613150

[m11a]

Right. But given that the entire point revolves around QuePaxa, it's strange to see no discussion on it. If that weren't the point, the article would be "Why Cloudflare implemented and deployed Paxos".

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)"

[eis]

But it's not a large-scale public deployment yet either. The article says towards the end that they just ran a proof of concept.

Maybe the blog post is just premature. It would be much more valuable if they posted it after actually having run it in production and validated the strengths and weaknesses with real world data.