Abstract: Techniques are disclosed for managing a high performance, fault-tolerant, strongly consistent, distributed key-value store system. The key-value store may store information, such as metadata for a distributed file system. Fault-tolerance means that the distributed key-value store continues to provide access to values in the key-value store in spite of a certain number of node failures. To provide this capability, the key-value store may store copies of (key, value) pair on N+1 nodes in order to provide fault tolerance for the failure of up to N nodes. In addition, metadata describing which nodes store a given value is stored on 2N+1 nodes and the distributed key-value store is sized such that there are 3N+1 nodes in a cluster. Doing so allows the key, value store to tolerate a failure of N nodes, while still maintaining a consistent and available key-value store.