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.
ETCD是CoreOS公司发起的一个开源项目，ETCD是用于共享配置和服务发现的分布式，一致性的KV存储系统。
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.
ETCD使用Raft协议来维护集群内各个节点状态的一致性。简单说，ETCD集群是一个分布式系统，由多个节点相互通信构成整体对外服务，每个节点都存储了完整的数据，并且通过Raft协议保证每个节点维护的数据是一致的。
Disaster recovery
etcd is designed to withstand machine failures. An etcd cluster automatically recovers from temporary failures (e.g., machine reboots) and tolerates up to (N-1)/2 permanent failures for a cluster of N members. When a member permanently fails, whether due to hardware failure or disk corruption, it loses access to the cluster. If the cluster permanently loses more than (N-1)/2 members then it disastrously fails, irrevocably losing quorum. Once quorum is lost, the cluster cannot reach consensus and therefore cannot continue accepting updates.
提供配置共享和服务发现的系统比较多，其中最为大家熟知的是[Zookeeper]（后文简称ZK），而ETCD可以算得上是后起之秀了。在项目实现，一致性协议易理解性，运维，安全等多个维度上，ETCD相比Zookeeper都占据优势。
Clustering Guide
Starting an etcd cluster statically requires that each member knows another in the cluster. In a number of cases, the IPs of the cluster members may be unknown ahead of time. In these cases, the etcd cluster can be bootstrapped with the help of a discovery service.
Once an etcd cluster is up and running, adding or removing members is done via runtime reconfiguration. To better understand the design behind runtime reconfiguration, we suggest reading the runtime configuration design document.
ETCD的使用场景
和ZK类似，ETCD有很多使用场景，包括：
配置管理
服务注册于发现
选主
应用调度
分布式队列
分布式锁
Discovery service protocol
Discovery service protocol helps new etcd member to discover all other members in cluster bootstrap phase using a shared discovery URL.
Discovery service protocol is only used in cluster bootstrap phase, and cannot be used for runtime reconfiguration or cluster monitoring.
The protocol uses a new discovery token to bootstrap one unique etcd cluster. Remember that one discovery token can represent only one etcd cluster. As long as discovery protocol on this token starts, even if it fails halfway, it must not be used to bootstrap another etcd cluster.
The rest of this article will walk through the discovery process with examples that correspond to a self-hosted discovery cluster. The public discovery service, discovery.etcd.io, functions the same way, but with a layer of polish to abstract away ugly URLs, generate UUIDs automatically, and provide some protections against excessive requests. At its core, the public discovery service still uses an etcd cluster as the data store as described in this document.