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etcd - CI/CD Glossary Definition

etcd is the distributed key-value store that holds all Kubernetes cluster state: every object, its spec, and its status. It is the single source of truth, so losing etcd means losing the cluster.

Why it matters

Because every kubectl apply ultimately writes to etcd, etcd performance bounds API server latency. Slow deploys in CI on large clusters often trace back to etcd contention.

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