[robszumski]

You can set up a local etcd proxy to mitigate this. You'd run the proxy listening on localhost, and then have it connected to the stable etcd cluster elsewhere.

The proxy can find the cluster manually or use SRV records. Autoscale the Postgres machines as much as you want after that while leaving etcd on stable machines.

[merb]

That's what we basically trying to do in the future, however that's really hard to do if you want to have a running etcd cluster with 5 nodes all the time. You would need to check if one etcd died, and then either promote a proxy to a etcd master or run a new machine (the later is only possible in clouds or virtual environments)

[SEJeff]

You can do that trivially with Mesos and have it always ensure 5 instances are running. Bonus points that it will run identically on bare metal and cross cloud which means less vendor lock in for you.