Cloudflare Meerkat: Rewriting the Global Distributed Control Plane with QuePaxa Leaderless Consensus

In July 2026, Cloudflare released the experimental consensus service Meerkat. Based on the QuePaxa algorithm proposed in 2023, it implements leaderless writes and has verified the globally strongly consistent control plane in scenarios with over 330 data centers. This article sorts out its design motivations compared to Raft, consensus log architecture, performance boundaries and PoC progress, and summarizes the community's discussions on the industrial implementation of asynchronous consensus.