Cloud services improve their availability by replicating data across sites in different geographical regions. A variety of state-machine replication protocols have been proposed for this setting that reduce the latency under workloads with low contention. However, when contention increases, these protocols may deliver lower performance than well-known Paxos algorithm. In this talk I will present SwiftPaxos – a protocol that lowers the best-case latency in comparison to Paxos without hurting the worst-case one. SwiftPaxos executes a command in a single round trip if there is no contention, and in 1.5 round trips otherwise. Differently from previous protocols, SwiftPaxos permits a replica to vote twice: first for its own proposal, and then to follow the leader. This mechanism avoids restarting the voting process when a disagreement occurs among replicas, saving computation time and message delays. This is joint work with Alexey Gotsman (IMDEA Software Institute) and Pierre Sutra (Télécom SudParis).