icroservices are becoming the de-facto way of building out large applications. If you haven't worked on a project that has migrated monoliths to micro-services, you are most likely working on a microservice of some flavor or another. And as you might imagine, Docker containers are the preferred way of delivering these services. Managing all of these containers and services is no easy task and has lead to the rise of private PAaS projects, operating systems, and orchestration framewoks like Deis, Mesos, Kubernetes - A new one is popping up every month.

Choosing a framework, or a stack is, in it of itself, no simple task.  Personally, I have been following CoreOS, both the company and the operating system as

Recently, I have been working with, and learning a lot about the new distributed operating system, CoreOS. It is really interesting and makes managing micro-service architectures, quite a bit easier than manually SSHing into each machine and dealing every node individually. At the heart of CoreOS sits ETCD, a distributed key / value store. Internally CoreOS uses it for node discovery, communication and orchestration. Unlike other key / value stores, ETCD feels a bit more like a file system with directories and files. A directory can contain multiple directories and files where a file can contain a single value. For example, you might store the name of the environment as /company/metadata/environment = staging. It is a data hierarchy, which means it