Container software vendor CoreOS Inc. has just released the latest version of its distributed key-value platform “etcd”, which is used to store data in containers across clusters. The platform, which is already integrated with Google’s open-source Kubernetes, now includes new data model and API features designed to make upgrades easier while supporting a wider range of container-based applications.

CoreOS said etcd version 3 implements new flexibility features such as transactional memory and distributed coordination primitives. The upgrade is also the first stable release of the etcd3 API and data model, the company said in a blog post.

CoreOS said it first designed its key-value store system in order to handle machine coordination issues durin updates. Since then though, its been extended to cover distributed networking discovery, data configuration, scheduling and load balancing services. CoreOS has been issuing upgrades for etcd in parallel to updates for Google’s Kubernetes.

Not surprisingly, Google is one of the biggest users of etcd, and is working closely with CoreOS to build out the Kubernetes ecosystem and make it “a production-grade container management system for the cloud-native community”, the companies said.

etcd has some other notable users besides, including Red Hat Inc.. NTT Corp. of Japan, and China’s Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. In the case of Red Hat, it’s actually leveraging components of both Docker containers and CoreOS’ key-value store for its own OpenShift container application software.

CoreOS said the etcd tool has evolved into a key-value store with JSON format endpoints. It added thatr some features are “chatty” with clients, which places quorum pressure on clusters when idling. While etcd V2 was adequate for coordinating machines, “Coordinating the proliferating micro-services in today’s infrastructure requires [a tool capable of] supporting tens of thousands of active clients operating on a million keys within a single cluster,” the company said.

As such, JSON has been replaced with the general RPC framework built on the HTTP/2 standard to increase efficiency. Meanwhile, native etcd3 clients communicate over the gRPC protocol. As for the new API, this incorporates what CoreOS calls a “lightweight streaming lease “keepalive” model”. In addition, the new data model eliminates key hierarchies, introducing a “flat binary key space with transactional multi-version concurrency control semantics,” the company said.

According to the company, etcd3 represents a “conceptual leap” ahead of earlier versions, with a more efficient API that’s able to scale up beyond the demand of current applications to future hyperscale clusters.

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