The open source etcd project, erstwhile managed by CoreOS/Red Hat, has been moved to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to accept etcd as an incubation-level hosted project from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Seattle.

First developed by the CoreOS team in 2013, etcd is a distributed key value store that helps store data across a cluster of machines with stability, reliability, scalability, and performance. The project – frequently teamed with applications such as Kubernetes, M3, Vitess, and Doorman – handles leader elections during network partitions and will tolerate machine failure, including the leader.

“etcd acts as a source of truth for systems like Kubernetes,” said Brian Grant, TOC representative and project sponsor, Principal Engineer at Google, and Kubernetes SIG Architecture Co-Chair and Steering Committee member. “As a critical component of every cluster, having a reliable way to automate its configuration and management is essential. etcd offers the necessary coordination mechanisms for cloud native distributed systems, and is cloud native itself.”

All Kubernetes clusters use etcd as their primary data store. As such, it handles storing and replicating data for Kubernetes cluster state and uses the Raft consensus algorithm to recover from hardware failure and network partitions. In addition to Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry also uses etcd as their distributed key-value store. This means etcd is used in production by companies such as Ancestry, ING, Pearson, Pinterest, The New York Times, Nordstrom, and many more.

Written in Go, etcd offers cross-platform support, small binaries, and a thriving contributor community. It also integrates with existing cloud native tooling like Prometheus monitoring, which can track important metrics like latency from the etcd leader and provide alerting and dashboards.