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