Private cloud services company Platform9 Systems Inc. is donating a new tool to the open-source community that makes it easier to deploy etcd clusters in the cloud, on-premises and in hybrid cloud environments.

The tool, called “etcdadm,” is essentially a command-line interface that enables developers to configure, install and operate secure etcd clusters wherever they choose to deploy them.,

For the uninitiated, etcd is a distributed key value store that used to provide a reliable way to store data across a cluster of machines. It’s popularly employed to store data for Kubernetes, which is the open-source orchestration software used to manage large deployments of software containers. Containers are used by developers to build applications just once that can run anywhere.

Etcdadm serves two other functions besides making it easier to deploy etcd clusters, including providing a recovery option from an existing backup in the event of data loss or other errors. It also helps to scale operations by making it simple to add or remove nodes to an etcd cluster, Platform9 officials said.

“Etcdadm is inspired by the user experience of the popular kubeadm open source project,” the company said by way of explanation. “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.”

Platform9 first built etcdadm for use with its own managed Kubernetes platform, but said it’s making the tool open source so the wider community can help to improve it.

“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.”

The etcdadm tool can be downloaded now via GitHub.

Image: Platform9