Inspired by the etcd-operator designed for Kubernetes, the etcd-cloud-operator manages etcd clusters deployed on cloud providers and helps human operators keep the data store running safely, even in the event of availability-zone wide failures.
Used in place of the etcd binary and with minimal configuration, the operator handles the configuration and lifecycle of etcd, based on data gathered from the cloud provider and the status of the etcd cluster itself.
The operator makes the assumption that it can trust the cloud provider's auto-scaling group feature to provide accurate information regarding the number of launched instances, and to automatically kill/re-provision crashed ones (e.g. when an rack switch went down or simply when the service health check has been failing for an extended amount of time).
- Failure recovery: Upon failure of a minority of the etcd members, the operator will automatically attempt to restart (rejoin if necessary) the member it manages, thus recovering from the failure.
- Disaster recovery: In the event of a failure of the majority of the members, resulting in the loss of quorum, the operator may try (if enabled) to seed a new cluster from a backup, once the expected amount of instances are present and the failed etcd cluster has been shot in the head (after forced backup of its remaining healthy members).
- Snapshots: The operator realizes backups of each etcd member periodically, to enable automated disaster recovery or manual recovery in case of force majeure.
- Resize: By abstracting the cluster management, resizing the cluster becomes straightforward as the underlying auto-scaling group can simply be scaled as desired.
The operator and etcd cluster can be easily configured using a YAML file. The configuration notably includes clients/peers TLS encryption/authentication, with the ability to automatically generate self-signed certificates if encryption is desired but authentication is not.
Running a managed etcd cluster using the operator is simply a matter of running the operator binary in a supported auto-scaling group (as of today, AWS only).
A Terraform module is available to easily try the operator out or integrate it into your infrastructure.
- Exposing Prometheus data about the cluster's health and resource usage, including the availability zones spread where etcd is deployed.
- Document use-cases, user-stories and statistics regarding failures.
- Adding support for major cloud-providers, such as Azure and GKE.