[jgraettinger1]

I think the "database" label is tripping up the conversation here. What's being talked about here, really, is fast & HA coordination over a (relatively) small amount of shared state by multiple actors within a distributed system. This is literally Etcd's raison d'etre, it excels at this use case.

There are many operational differences between Etcd and a traditional RDBMs, but the biggest ones are that broadcasting updates (so that actors may react) is a core operation, and the MVCC log is "exposed" (via ModRevision) so that actors can resolve state disagreements (am I out of date, or are you?).