Etcd

etcd is a dependable, fault-tolerant, and highly available key value store, used to coordinate and back up all the Kubernetes cluster data. It specifically manages data for configurations, the state of the cluster, as well as metadata related to the cluster. etcd provides a single, consistent source of truth regarding the status of the system, its clusters, pods, and the application instances inside them at any given time. In essence, etcd is the data store used to create and maintain this version of the truth.

In this section, we demonstrate how to configure etcd backups, and review etcd Secrets Encryption.