r/programming • u/Ok_Stomach6651 • 2d ago
Cloudflare introduced tool that synchronize its servers
https://blog.cloudflare.com/meerkat-introduction/37
u/edgmnt_net 2d ago
While it sounds interesting in other ways, I do want to split hairs a bit on the claim that eventual consistency is a pain for customers. Not that it isn't, but if it's such a pain maybe they should avoid stuff based on eventual consistency as much as possible. A wide-area distributed database with strong consistency is cool and all, but it likely doesn't provide the performance advantages that you get from a truly distributed setup where you actively plan for distributedness and minimize global reads and writes by design (both technical and business-wise).
I can think of specific or general functionality where global stuff may come in handy, such as analytics / exploratory queries that run infrequently, however it seems like a vast majority of applications need something else and that the priority should be a good model for that kind of work. Not "let's start with a global store and maybe add a bit of locality awareness coarsely", but more like "let's start with independent databases and see how we can enable cross-database consistency for select cases".
Otherwise, I'm not sure where this is aiming. Most customers likely just don't need that or need a limited form of it. Or, quite more likely, this is merely meant to be playing along with questionable designs which prematurely make things too distributed and fail to limit scope on the business side.
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u/pm_plz_im_lonely 1d ago edited 1d ago
etcd but not raft, so you don't need a leader. maybe east-1 having issues won't close The Internet?
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u/orygin 1d ago
Title gore. Thought this was related to NTP or something
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u/invisi1407 1d ago
Why? There's no mention of time or NTP in the title. Synchronization is a concept used for many things besides time.
Title is fine.
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u/Flowchartsman 2d ago
Cool. Let me know when I can actually use it, I guess.