Introducing Quicksilver: Configuration Distribution at Internet Scale

Cloudflare's network processes over fourteen million HTTP requests per second globally. To manage these high volumes of traffic, the company relies heavily on its configuration distribution system that needs to be fast and reliable. Historically, this system was built on top of Kyoto Tycoon (KT) datastore but as the company grew, KT started showing its limitations. The team decided to build a new replicated key-value store called Quicksilver tailored for their needs. Quicksilver uses LMDB as its storage engine and implements a fan-out type distribution mechanism for changes in customer configurations. It also includes features like transaction logs, batch mode updates, and optimizations such as compression and incremental hashing to improve performance and reduce disk space usage. The system is monitored using Prometheus and Grafana, with alerts distributed via PagerDuty. Cloudflare plans to open-source Quicksilver in the near future.

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