# etcd

9 Hacker News commenters recommended etcd and 23 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Recommended as a distributed key-value store that performs well on fast disks. Critics cite unreliability, data corruption and scaling limits.

## Why people recommend it

- Handles tens of thousands of QPS (3 comments): "It's totally possible to run tens of thousands of QPS on etcd if your disks are NVMEs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46043191)) "Having run a fleet of 100s of etcd clusters for 10000s of rps" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49266302)) "We had run etcd at much larger volumes without issues" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46060257))
- Trusted for distributed key-value storage (3 comments): "If you need a full-featured distributed KV store, you should look at etcd." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46006213)) "for small projects, SQLite, rqlite, or etcd" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46339196)) "big projects like Docker, Kubernetes, etcd" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46112268))

## What people warn about

- Frequent bugs and unreliability (4 comments): "Sounds to me that etcd has data handoff consistency issues, and is just flying by seat of its pants" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47103204)) "has had numerous liveness and safety bugs, with one happening as recently as December of 2025" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49263449)) "the OG etcd was a disaster that needed better engineers to completely rewrite" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50323663))
- Corruption and data loss reported (2 comments): "Etcd corruption and loss of quorum is extremely common in practice" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49267396)) "etcd had serious issues including silent data corruption" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49263912))
- Scaling and size limits (2 comments): "if you create too many resources you can easily use up all of the 8GB hard coded maximum size in etcd" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46036943)) "The main issue I've actually encountered is that etcd doesn't scale" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876508))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [LMDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/lmdb.md): 20 recommend
- [RocksDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rocksdb.md): 20 recommend
- [LevelDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/leveldb.md): 5 recommend
- [LMDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/lightning-memory-mapped-database-manager.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "etcd", https://hackerapproved.com/p/etcd/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).