CoreOS is a new lightweight Linux distribution that has been re-architected to provide features needed to run what its development team labels as “modern infrastructure” stacks for what are usually clustered deployments.

This operating system provides the “minimal functionality” required (and therefore no additional functionality) for deploying applications inside software containers with built-in mechanisms for service discovery and configuration sharing

According to CoreOS, “The strategies and architectures that influence CoreOS allow companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter to run their services at scale with high resilience.”

The team has recently announced the availability of etcd 2.0, the first stable version of the open source distributed key-value store.

A key-value pair (KVP) is a set of two linked data items: a key, which is a unique identifier for some item of data, and the value, which is either the data that is identified or a pointer to the location of that data.

So what is etcd?

Essentially, etcd is an open source, distributed, consistent key-value store for shared configuration, service discovery, and scheduler coordination.

“By using etcd, applications can ensure that even in the face of individual servers failing, the application will continue to work. etcd is a core component of CoreOS software that facilitates safe automatic updates, coordinating work being scheduled to hosts, and setting up overlay networking for containers,” said the developer team.