Have you ever experienced a Kubernetes cluster that suddenly stops responding? As basic debugging steps, you run kubectl commands, but all of them result in a request timeout. So what is happening? Most likely, etcd is failing.
Etcd, as we know, is the sole distributed key-value store for Kubernetes, responsible for continuously and consistently storing the state of the entire cluster. Every configuration, workload information, node registration is stored in etcd. So, a degraded etcd cluster can cause stale reads and a possible cluster-wide outage since Kubernetes cannot reconcile or serve API requests.
In this session, we’ll explore common causes of etcd failures that affect Kubernetes stability and performance. We’ll also discuss debugging methods and introduce tools like etcd-diagnosis to analyse the health of etcd in a running cluster. Finally, we’ll share the best practices for operating etcd - upgrades, backups, recovery, and key workarounds to ensure a resilient control plane.