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etcd for DC/OS

etcd is an open-source distributed key-value store. This project aims to deploy etcd in a distributed and high-availability manner on DC/OS clusters and provides a package for easy installation and management.

(!) This package is currently in beta. Use in production environments at your own risk.

Installation

We are working on making this package available in the DC/OS Universe.

Requirements

• DC/OS cluster running at least version 1.11 (both OSS and EE are supported)
• Installed and configured dcos cli
• At least 4 cores and 2 GB RAM free on your cluster

Quickstart

dcos package install etcd

By default the package will install 3 nodes. Check the DC/OS UI to see if all of the nodes have been started. Once installation is complete you can reach the HTTP API from inside the cluster via http://api.etcd.l4lb.thisdcos.directory:2379.

Configure TLS

DC/OS OpenSource

etcd has a feature called auto-tls. If this is enabled, etcd will create self-signed certificates on startup and use them to secure communication between cluster members (peers) and between clients and cluster members. Be advised that peer-authentication using certificates is not enabled with auto-tls.

To enable auto-tls create a options.json file with the following contents:

{
  "etcd": {
    "tls_enabled": true,
    "use_auto_tls": true,
  }
}

Then install etcd using the following command: dcos package install etcd --options=options.json. Once the cluster is installed you can access the API only via HTTPS (https://api.etcd.l4lb.thisdcos.directory:2379).

DC/OS Enterprise

If you want to enable TLS support you first need to create a serviceaccount:

dcos security org service-accounts keypair private-key.pem public-key.pem
dcos security org service-accounts create -p public-key.pem -d "etcd service account" etcd-principal
dcos security secrets create-sa-secret --strict private-key.pem etcd-principal etcd/principal
dcos security org groups add_user superusers etcd-principal

Then create a options.json file with the following contents:

{
  "service": {
    "service_account_secret": "etcd/principal",
    "service_account": "etcd-principal"
  },
  "etcd": {
    "tls_enabled": true
  }
}

Then install etcd using the following command: dcos package install etcd --options=options.json.

Once the cluster is installed you can access the API only via HTTPS (https://api.etcd.l4lb.thisdcos.directory:2379). etcd uses certificates created and signed by the cluster-internal DC/OS CA. Communication between cluster members (peers) is secured so that only members with a valid certificate from the cluster-internal CA are allowed to connect. Connections via the HTTPS API are allowed for everyone but you must either add the CA root certificate to your truststore (see DC/OS documentation on how to retrieve it) or disable certificate checking (only do that for testing).

Advanced configuration

There are a number of other options you can use to configure etcd:

• service.virtual_network_enabled and service.virtual_network_name: Configure overlay network for etcd
• node.cpus: Number of cores per etcd node. Depending on the load of your cluster you should adjust this. For low loads 0.5 is sufficient. Default is 1.
• node.mem: Memory in MB per etcd node. Change this depending on the number of keys stored in your etcd cluster. Default is 256.
• node.disk: Disk size in MB. Default is 100.
• node.disk_type: For etcd installations with high loads you should change this to MOUNT (requires preconfigured volumes on your DC/OS agents) to give etcd its own disk.
• etcd.heartbeat_interval: Time (in milliseconds) of a heartbeat interval. Default is 100.
• etcd.election_timeout: Time (in milliseconds) for an election to timeout. Default is 1000.
• etcd.snapshot_count: Number of committed transactions to trigger a snapshot to disk. Increase this if you have a busy cluster. Default is 100000.

For all configuration options see dcos package describe etcd --config.

Reconfiguration

To change the configuration of etcd update your options file and then run dcos etcd update start --options=options.json. Be aware that during the update all the etcd nodes will be restarted one by one and there will be a short downtime when the current leader is restarted.

You can increase the number of nodes, but not decrease it to avoid data loss. Also enabling/disabling TLS on an already installed cluster is not supported. If you need to do that, take a backup of your data and reinstall etcd.

Troubleshooting

Handle node failure

etcd stores its data locally on the host system it is running on. The data will survive a restart. In the event of a host failure the etcd node running on that host is lost and must be replaced. To do this, just run:

dcos etcd pod replace <pod-name>  (e.g. etcd-2)

The new pod will automatically remove the old failed member from the etcd cluster and add itself as a new member. If you need to replace more than one node wait between replacements to give the cluster time to copy all data and stabilize itself.

etcd can recover from a failure as long as a majority of nodes remain operational (at most (N-1)/2 failures). If you installed etcd with the default number of 3 nodes that means that one node can fail without loosing any data. If more nodes fail automatic recovery is not possible. You can try a manual recovery.

Manually recover etcd cluster node

In case something goes wrong and the automatic recovery is not successful you can try to manually recover a node. See the etcd Disaster recovery documentation for possible actions. To do this run the following commands (we assume the faulty node is etcd-2):

dcos etcd pod replace etcd-2
# wait till pod is starting
dcos etcd debug pod pause etcd-2
dcos task exec -it etcd-2-node bash
# do your repairs and add the node as a member to the etcd cluster
touch $MESOS_SANDBOX/etcd-data/initialized   # this file signals the framework that the node is already initialized and configured
exit
dcos etcd debug pod resume etcd-2

Features

• Deploys a distributed etcd cluster
• Supports configurable number of nodes (minimum of three nodes)
• Configuration changes and version updates in a rolling-restart fashion
• Automatic TLS encryption

Limitations

• Due to the nature of the leader failure detection and reelection process short downtimes during updates can not be avoided.
• Enabling/Disabling TLS on an already installed cluster is not supported.

Acknowledgements

This framework is based on the DC/OS SDK and was developed using dcosdev. Thanks to Mesosphere for providing these tools.

Disclaimer

This project is not associated with CoreOS or RedHat in any form.

This software is provided as-is. Use at your own risk.