Why etcd Became the Backbone of Cloud‑Native Systems

On December 11, 2018, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, the etcd project officially joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a vendor‑neutral organization that promotes cloud‑native technologies.

Origins and Growth

etcd was launched in 2013 by Li Xiang, Brandon Philips, and Alex Polvi to provide reliable storage of critical metadata and coordination for distributed systems. Over five years, more than 400 contributors have made over 14,000 commits, releasing more than 150 versions.

Technical Foundations

The etcd2 release introduced the etcd/raft library, now one of the most stable and feature‑rich open‑source consensus protocols. It powers the data‑replication engines of well‑known distributed databases such as etcd itself, TiKV, CockroachDB, and Dgraph, driving over 100,000 clusters worldwide.

etcd3 added multi‑version control, transactions, and other features that greatly simplify distributed application development, improving efficiency and stability. After five years of evolution, etcd has become the default storage backend for many container orchestration systems, most notably Kubernetes, which relies on etcd for reliable cluster state storage.

Adoption by Alibaba

etcd is a critical component of Alibaba’s infrastructure. Alibaba’s cluster manager Sigma uses etcd as its core storage engine, supporting hundreds of thousands of hosts and millions of containers. Alibaba Cloud Container Service (ACK) also employs etcd to provide stable, reliable, and secure enterprise‑grade container services. Additionally, Alibaba Cloud Function Compute uses etcd for efficient coordination and storage in function scheduling and execution.

Future Development Plans

Alibaba, as a major maintainer and user of etcd, plans to contribute several enhancements: adding a pre‑vote feature to improve reliability in unstable network conditions, introducing a Learner role for more efficient and controllable data backup, and supporting diverse storage backends (e.g., LSM‑based local storage, SQL‑type databases) to boost storage efficiency and scalability.

Alibaba commits to continued investment in etcd and other essential open‑source cloud‑native technologies, aiming to accelerate cloud‑native adoption and empower developers to build efficient applications across various scenarios.