# Meeting Notes: Distributed Key-Value Store

Date: July 14, 2026  
Time: 10:00 AM - 10:45 AM ET

## Attendees

- Priya Shah, Engineering Lead
- Marcus Lee, Backend Engineer
- Elena Torres, SRE
- Daniel Kim, Storage Systems Engineer
- Aisha Rahman, Product Manager
- Victor Chen, QA Engineer

## Agenda

1. Review current cluster performance under write-heavy workloads
2. Discuss replication lag observed in staging
3. Decide on default consistency mode for beta users
4. Confirm rollout plan for compaction improvements
5. Assign owners for next milestones

## Discussion

The team reviewed load test results from the latest staging run. The cluster sustained 180k writes per second across five nodes, but p99 write latency increased from 42 ms to 115 ms once disk utilization passed 72%.

Replication lag peaked at 8.4 seconds during node failover testing. Elena noted that the lag appears tied to backpressure in the raft apply queue rather than network saturation.

Daniel walked through the proposed compaction changes. Early benchmarks show a 28% reduction in read amplification and more predictable disk usage during sustained writes.

Aisha asked whether beta customers should default to strong consistency or session consistency. The engineering team recommended session consistency as the default, with strong consistency available per request for critical paths.

## Decisions

- Default beta configuration will use session consistency.
- Strong consistency will be exposed as an opt-in request flag.
- Compaction improvements will ship behind a feature flag.
- The team will prioritize reducing raft apply queue backpressure before expanding the beta.
- Load tests must include at least one node failure scenario before each release candidate.

## Action Items

- Marcus: Add request-level strong consistency flag to the client API by July 19.
- Elena: Create dashboards for raft apply queue depth and replication lag by July 18.
- Daniel: Finish compaction feature flag wiring and staging rollout plan by July 21.
- Victor: Update failure-injection test cases for node restart and network partition scenarios by July 22.
- Priya: Review beta readiness checklist with product and support teams by July 24.
- Aisha: Draft customer-facing consistency model documentation by July 25.