Overview
etcd is a distributed key value store that provides a reliable way to store data across a cluster of machines. It’s open-source and available on GitHub. etcd gracefully handles leader elections during network partitions and will tolerate machine failure, including the leader.
Your applications can read and write data into etcd. A simple use-case is to store database connection details or feature flags in etcd as key value pairs. These values can be watched, allowing your app to reconfigure itself when they change.
Advanced uses take advantage of the consistency guarantees to implement database leader elections or do distributed locking across a cluster of workers.
Simple Interface
Read and write values with curl and other HTTP libraries
Key/Value Storage
Store data in directories, similar to a file system
Watch for Changes
Watch a key or directory for changes and react to the new values
Optional SSL client cert authentication
Benchmarked at 1000s of writes/s per instance
Optional TTLs for keys expiration
Properly distributed via Raft protocol
Technical Overview
etcd is written in Go which has excellent cross-platform support, small binaries and a great community behind it. Communication between etcd machines is handled via the Raft consensus algorithm.
Latency from the etcd leader is the most important metric to track and the built-in dashboard has a view dedicated to this. In our testing, severe latency will introduce instability within the cluster because Raft is only as fast as the slowest machine in the majority. You can mitigate this issue by properly tuning the cluster. etcd has been pre-tuned on cloud providers with highly variable networks.
