The etcd performance benchmarks run etcd on 8 vCPU, 16GB RAM, 50GB SSD GCE instances, but any relatively modern machine with low latency storage and a few gigabytes of memory should suffice for most use cases. Applications with large v2 data stores will require more memory than a large v3 data store since data is kept in anonymous memory instead of memory mapped from a file. than For running etcd on a cloud provider, we suggest at least a medium instance on AWS or a standard-1 instance on GCE.
The easiest way to get etcd is to use one of the pre-built release binaries which are available for OSX, Linux, Windows, appc, and Docker. Instructions for using these binaries are on the GitHub releases page.
For those wanting to try the very latest version, build etcd from the master branch.
Go version 1.6+ (with HTTP2 support) is required to build the latest version of etcd.
etcd vendors its dependency for official release binaries, while making vendoring optional to avoid import conflicts.
build script would automatically include the vendored dependencies from cmd directory.
Here are the commands to build an etcd binary from the master branch:
# go is required
$ go version
go version go1.6 darwin/amd64
# GOPATH should be set correctly
$ echo $GOPATH
/Users/example/go
$ mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/coreos
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/coreos
$ git clone https://github.com/coreos/etcd.git
$ cd etcd
$ ./build
$ ./bin/etcd
...
Check the etcd binary is built correctly by starting etcd and setting a key.
Start etcd:
$ ./bin/etcd
Set a key:
$ ETCDCTL_API=3 ./bin/etcdctl put foo bar
OK
If OK is printed, then etcd is working!