Platform9 has open sourced its etcdadm tool, answering the prayers of anyone who’s ever said to themselves, “I could really do with a command line interface to manage Kubernetes clusters”.

The Kubernetes focused IaaS shop said the project was designed to “streamline the setup and ongoing operations of production etcd clusters”.

Etcd is the Kubernetes stack component which stores the state of a Kubernetes cluster, and is required for a high availability clusters. At the same time, bringing up a secure etcd cluster is “difficult” Platform9 says. And then there’s managing the thing once you’ve installed it.

It said that while the extant kubeadm project also provides a CLI for Kubernetes clusters, it can only deploy a single etcd instance, and doesn’t deploy clusters, which is “insufficient for production Kubernetes environments”.

Platform9 said its project – originally developed as part of its own commercial offering – would deliver easy deployment, recovery and scaling. It will install binaries, configure systemd services, generates certificate, and calls the etcd API to add or remove members.

It said it runs on any Linux distro, including Ubuntu, CentOS, and Container Linux, though the project’s GutHub page says it was “currently tested on Container Linux, with plans for other platforms.

Daniel Lipovetsky, Kubernetes Technical Lead Architect at Platform9, said in a video acommpanying the tool’s release, that it “Solves a very specific problem – a  sequence of tasks an operator needs to perform on a specific host – it does not orchestrate or automate the operation of an etcd cluster.”

He suggested that other tools – such as etcd-manager – which are designed to manage cluster operations, could delegate tasks to etcdadm.

You can get full details of the project at GitHub here, while the Platform9 website has that short video which runs through the bones of the project, and will helpfully equip you with the correct pronunciation of the project.