# Meeting Notes: Distributed Key-Value Store Design Review

Date: July 10, 2026
Time: 10:00 AM - 10:45 AM ET
Location: Video Conference

## Attendees

- Maya Chen, Engineering Manager
- Ravi Patel, Staff Backend Engineer
- Elena Morales, Distributed Systems Engineer
- Jordan Kim, SRE
- Priya Nair, Product Manager
- Marcus Reed, Security Engineer
- Owen Brooks, QA Lead

## Agenda

1. Review current architecture proposal
2. Discuss consistency model and replication strategy
3. Define failure handling and recovery expectations
4. Review operational requirements for observability and rollout
5. Confirm next steps before prototype milestone

## Discussion Notes

The team reviewed the proposed architecture for the distributed key-value store. The current design uses partitioned key ranges with replication across three availability zones. Each shard will have one leader and two followers, with leader election handled through the coordination service.

Ravi recommended starting with per-key linearizable writes and strongly consistent reads from the leader, while allowing an optional stale-read path from followers for low-risk workloads. Elena noted that eventual consistency would reduce latency but would complicate client behavior and conflict handling.

Jordan raised concerns about recovery time after leader failure. The group agreed that failover should complete within 10 seconds for the initial production target, with longer-term work to reduce that to 3 seconds.

Security requirements were also discussed. Marcus confirmed that encryption in transit is mandatory for all node-to-node and client-to-node communication. Encryption at rest will use the existing platform-managed disk encryption standard.

QA requested clearer behavior definitions for partial failures, network partitions, and write retries. Owen emphasized that test cases need to include duplicate client requests, stale leader writes, and shard rebalancing during active traffic.

## Decisions

- The initial consistency model will provide linearizable writes and leader-based strongly consistent reads.
- Follower reads will be supported later as an explicit opt-in client option.
- Replication factor will be three, spread across availability zones where available.
- Leader election will use the existing coordination service rather than a custom consensus implementation in the first version.
- The first prototype will target range-based partitioning, with hash partitioning deferred until load distribution data is available.
- Client write requests must include idempotency tokens to support safe retries.
- Metrics must include per-shard latency, replication lag, leader election count, failed write count, and storage utilization.

## Action Items

- Ravi: Draft the write path sequence diagram, including retry and idempotency behavior, by July 15.
- Elena: Document leader election and replication failure scenarios by July 16.
- Jordan: Define SLO targets and required dashboards for the prototype environment by July 17.
- Marcus: Review TLS certificate rotation requirements for node-to-node communication by July 18.
- Owen: Create the initial failure-mode test plan covering partitions, failover, and shard movement by July 19.
- Priya: Confirm product requirements for stale reads and expected customer workloads by July 20.
- Maya: Schedule prototype readiness review for the week of July 27.