[robszumski]

I was around at CoreOS before Kubernetes existed. I don't recall exactly when etcd was chosen at the data store, but the Google team valued focus for this very important part of the system.

etcd didn't have an embedded DNS server, etc. Of course, these things can be built on top of etcd easily. Upstream has taken advantage of this by swapping the DNS server used in Kubernetes twice, IIRC.

Contrast this with Consul which contains a DNS server and is now moving into service mesh territory. This isn't a fault of Consul at all, just a desire to be a full solution vs a building block.

[otterley]

My understanding is that Google valued the fact that etcd was willing to support gRPC and Consul wasn't -- i.e., raw performance/latency was the gating factor. etcd was historically far less stable and less well documented than Consul, even though Consul had more functionality. etcd may have caught up in the last couple years, though.

[smarterclayton]

At the time gRPC was not part of etcd - that only arrived in etcd 3.x.

The design of etcd 3.x was heavily influenced by the Kube usecase, but the original value of etcd was that

A) you could actually do an reasonably cheap HA story (vs Singleton DBs)

B) the clustering fundamentals were sound (zookeeper at the time was not able to do dynamic reconfiguration, although in practice this hasn’t been a big issue)

C) consul came with a lot of baggage that we wanted to do differently - not to knock consul, it just overlapped with alternate design decisions (like a large local agent instead of a set of lightweight agents)

D) etcd was the simplest possible option that also supported efficient watch

While I wasn’t part of the pre open sourcing discussions, I agreed with the initial rationale and I don’t regret the choice.

The etcd2 - 3 migration was more painful than it could be, but most of the challenges I think were excacerbated by us not pulling the bandaid off early and forcing a 2-3 migration for all users right after 1.6.

[piva00]

My impression is that etcd works more in a lower-level data store abstraction than Consul, exactly why it's not so feature-rich but is used as building block. Consul packs more out-the-box if that's what you need.

Both are atill much better to operate than ZooKeeper.