DEVOPSdigest

Platform9 announced etcdadm – a new open source project available under the Apache v2.0 license on GitHub.

etcdadm is a kubeadm-like open source command-line tool that allows users to easily configure, install and operate secure etcd clusters that can run anywhere – in the cloud, on-premises, as well as in air-gapped environments.

etcdadm provides:

- Easy deployment of a secure etcd cluster

- Recovery from quorum loss – by easily deploying a secure cluster from an existing etcd backup

- Scaling operations – with easy addition or removal of nodes in an etcd cluster

etcdadm can run on any Linux distribution such as Ubuntu, CentOS and Container Linux. etcdadm was developed for use within Platform9’s commercial offering, Platform9 Managed Kubernetes. Platform9 is contributing it to the open source community to streamline the setup and ongoing operations of production etcd clusters.

etcdadm is inspired by the user experience of the popular kubeadm open source project. kubeadm provides an easy command-line interface for instantiating Kubernetes clusters, but currently doesn’t deploy etcd clusters. It only deploys a single etcd instance, which is insufficient for production Kubernetes environments.

etcd is a key component in the Kubernetes stack, storing the state of the Kubernetes cluster, including node and workload information. An etcd cluster is required to provide high availability of a Kubernetes cluster.

“For production use, where availability and redundancy are important factors, running etcd as a cluster is critical.“ Said Arun Sriraman, Kubernetes Technical Lead Manager at Platform9. “Bringing up a secure etcd cluster – particularly on-premises – is difficult. It involves downloading the right binaries, writing the initial cluster configuration on each etcd node, setting and bringing up etcd. This is in addition to configuring the certificate authority and certificates for secure connections. At Platform9, we envisioned a kubeadm-type tool that could easily create a secure etcd cluster using simple init/join semantics and abstracting away complexities from users. This was our motivation for “etcdadm”, said Sriraman.

“Installing an etcd cluster only solves half of the problem,” added Daniel Lipovetsky, Kubernetes Technical Lead Architect at Platform9. “Day two” operations and management of the etcd cluster are equally important. We wanted to simplify scaling and disaster recovery, so that the tedious work is done by the tool, rather than by the Kubernetes user. We designed etcdadm to make it easy to add or remove members from a cluster, and also made sure that etcdadm helps you recover from quorum loss by easily creating a cluster from backup.”

”etcdadm allows developers to easily create secure etcd clusters, and Operations teams to operate these in production, safely and effectively,” said Roopak Parikh, CTO and co-founder of Platform9. “At Platform9, we are committed to open source – it’s at the heart of everything we do, and we have a history of contributing to the open source community. We are proud to open source this project for the industry to use, as our way of giving back to the Kubernetes community that is advancing the art and science of software delivery.”