Are we actually getting any value out of etcd?

[stevejhiggs]

Does anyone actually use the replication features of etcd?

If not you could switch to something that's more of a known quantity e.g. redis.

In fact if we did stick an api in for the server you could even just use a flat json file, which would make setup a touch easier.

[tombuildsstuff]

I'd probably suggest Postgres over Redis - but the point still stands.

For me at least, etcD seems to be architectural flair - so I've no objections to switching this out

[stevejhiggs]

architectural flair - awesome

[andyroyle]

The original concern was making the toggles simple to retrieve (from the client) and readily available (hence the replication for etcd). It was thought that we would run an etcd cluster that spanned multiple datacenters so that apps could read from a local replica, and in the event of a network partition (outside the DC) apps could still get toggles and wouldn't be blocked from starting by etcd being down.

Whether or not anyone uses it that way is another matter 😉

Tbh most of the important stuff we achieved with client-side (i.e. application-side) code (caching toggles, default values etc).

[chriscartlidge]

I did question this myself when working on Hobknob for the first time as it does seem to be overkill. I do like the suggestion of Postgres but is the time required to switch to Postgres/Anything else worth it... What benefit aim I getting out of it apart from it being a bit more familiar ?

Internally we have a roadmap to upgrade etcd to version 3.0 within the next month. That is my preferred option, unless any other main contributors have a strong option not to continue with etcd.

[tombuildsstuff]

Just to follow up here - I've just pushed PR #179. In particular this would both allow us to support one or more back-ends - potentially even having the API as a 'backend' for the server as discussed in #154, but I'm not so keen on the latter.

It's been a little while - but has anyone had time to reflect on this? Internally we've been bashing around the idea of using Consul instead of etcD for this purpose?

[chriscartlidge]

Hey @tombuildsstuff have you guys had any thought about moving over to consul ?

We upgrade to the latest etcd a few months ago and found it to be a lot less memory leaky than the previous one we were using.