etcd Maintenance for Self-Managed Clusters#
etcd is the backing store for all Kubernetes cluster state. Every object – pods, services, secrets, configmaps – lives in etcd. If etcd is unhealthy, your cluster is unhealthy. If etcd data is lost, your cluster is gone. Managed Kubernetes services (EKS, GKE, AKS) handle etcd for you, but self-managed clusters require you to operate it directly.
All etcdctl commands below require TLS flags. Set these as environment variables to avoid repeating them: