HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
etcd-io
etcd
Go2013–2024
etcd-io / etcd

etcd

Distributed reliable key-value store for the most critical data of a distributed system

Data & DatabasesSystems & InfrastructureDevOps & Cloud
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
79Distinct people
108Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
52.6KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Distributed reliable key-value store for the most critical data of a distributed system

GitHub

Where it is used

  • Fidelity Investments — “We use CoreDNS for service discovery, etcd as KV store, Fluentd for logging, Helm as a package manager, Kubernetes for container orchestration, rely on CNI …” Source

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 5:05:26 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year108 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-07-31 15:48:56 UTC to 2024-11-28 01:23:10 UTC.

051015202013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 2 submissions, 9 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 0 submissions, 13 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 20 mentions; 2 submissions, 18 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 15 mentions; 0 submissions, 15 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 0 submissions, 12 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 2 submissions, 2 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1129
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13013
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC20218
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC15015
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC12012
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC422
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707

What Hacker News says

8 sources
013a·Jul 14, 2020
I feel as if I have to repeat this during most discussions about Kubernetes and its halo technologies: Kubernetes is not developed by Google. gRPC is not developed by Google. etcd is not developed by Google. These are all projects under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation; its Platinum-level sponsors include: Alibaba, AWS, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, JD, Microsoft, NetApp, Oracle, PaloAlto Networks, Red Hat, SAP, and VMWare. Also included are 20 Gold-level Sponsors, 415 Silver-level sponsors, 3 Academic sponsors, 13 Non-profits, and 100 End-user supporters. That's a total of 570 organizations with a vested interest, and voting rights, on the direction of their projects. But Google does a lot of technical oversight, right? A non-zero amount. Among the eleven people of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committ
Read the rest
ee, Google has ONE representative (Saad Ali. Learn their names. These aren't just faceless mega-corps we're talking about; they're real people). Microsoft has the most, at two. Also represented is Apple, Intuit, Docker, American Express, Aqua Security, Lyft, Rancher, and Alibaba. But, ok, Google "sneaks in" a lot of code, right? They're super-evil, that's the message we're trying to convey here. Of the top ten contributors to etcd [1], there's only two people who seem like they work at Google. The top contributor, by far, works at AWS. Alright, fine. Kubernetes was created at Google, this much we cannot deny. Started by Brendan Burns (now at Microsoft), Joe Beda (now at VMWare), and Craig McLuckie (now at VMWare), all Google engineers a decade ago. Yeah, the thought leaders behind the project sure are still making that sweet sweet Google money, sure seems like it. Its just tremendously incredible to me that anyone still believes Google has a large say in CNCF projects. [1] https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/graphs/contributors
In Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad
sercand·Jul 14, 2020
By using gRPC, we get much more without thinking too much. Also, bi-directional streaming is instantaneous and it is not like afterthought long polling. For example, whole etcd API is located at https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/blob/4c6881ffe4b3bae257c0720... It is pretty straightforward and not too hard to understand the API. Designing APIs with protobuf makes things convenient and it brings lots of already written tools with it. Since gRPC built on top of HTTP/2, we thought gRPC as easiest and performant way of writing a HTTP API with good defaults.
In Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad
alpb·Jul 14, 2020
First of all etcd API is still available on a JSON interface. https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/blob/master/Documentation/de... and some historical discussion here: https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/issues/1980 Many reasons to switch from JSON to gRPC: * gRPC uses HTTP/2 which means you can concurrently make multiple requests on a single TCP connection, while on a typical JSON API which probably uses http/1.1, you can't. * Type safety of protobuf types. * Bi-directional streaming e.g. Kubernetes controllers use the Watch API which notifies the object changes/add/deletes in etcd to the control plane. * Client libraries are automatically generated, and not error prone. * RPCs are already optimized for bytes on the wire efficiency, whereas JSON is not. This matters a great deal as Kubernetes objects get large in size/quantity over time but contr
Read the rest
ollers still work effectively by not spending too much CPU on encoding/decoding like they do on JSON. * Similar to the previous point, most json decoders don't reuse objects, so every decoded object is a new alloc, whereas gRPC can Reset() and reuse the same object while decoding/encoding. * Builtin authentication primitives (such as JWT/tokens or even adding TLS to client and/or server). * gRPC has support for interceptors which are like middleware functions you can inject to requests/responses on both client and server-side for logging, authorizing etc. The list goes on, but something to note is that etcd was not developed by Google (and as far as I know, not by ex-Googlers). Both etcd and gRPC are owned by the same open source foundation, so it's natural that they make use of an existing technology.
In Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad
philips·May 9, 2020
FWIW, CockroachDB uses and co-maintains etcd/raft not hashicorp/raft. https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/tree/master/raft#raft-librar... Users: - cockroachdb A Scalable, Survivable, Strongly-Consistent SQL Database - dgraph A Scalable, Distributed, Low Latency, High Throughput Graph Database - etcd A distributed reliable key-value store - tikv A Distributed transactional key value database powered by Rust and Raft - swarmkit A toolkit for orchestrating distributed systems at any scale. https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/tree/master/raft#notable-use... Go docs https://pkg.go.dev/go.etcd.io/etcd/raft?tab=doc
In In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (2014) [pdf]
kodablah·Jan 30, 2020
> This is, apparently, not correct. Asking for revision 0 causes etcd to stream updates beginning with whatever revision the server has now, plus one, rather than the first revision. Asking for revision 1 yields all changes. This behavior was not documented. I had worked on an alternative etcd impl and had to workaround this assumption as well. It is technically documented in the proto[0], and numeric 0 is of course "unset" or "default" in proto3 land. One thing I would like to see tested is nested transactions where one txn child mutates something then the second sibling txn child uses that something. I've found that implementation is lacking. 0 - https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/blob/53f15caf73b9285d6043009...
In Jepsen: Etcd 3.4.3
philips·Jan 30, 2020
etcd is used as the primary data store of applications like Kubernetes or CoreDNS. But, many use it for configuration like M3 or Vitess. You can see different users in the docs[1]. There are different databases like CockroachDB or Dgraph that use etcd's raft libraries but build more application focused (SQL, graphql, etc) APIs[2]. [1]: https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/blob/master/Documentation/in... [2]: https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/tree/master/raft#notable-use...
In Jepsen: Etcd 3.4.3

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.