I didn’t mean to imply they were different approaches (they aren’t really), only that you could offload the job from etcd to somewhere else to rely on it less,

I didn’t mean to imply they were different approaches (they aren’t really), only that you could offload the job from etcd to somewhere else to rely on it less, which would hopefully help scalability or allow you to lower the ping time. And yes, FDB separates the act of detecting a failure from reacting to a detected failure for that reason. In FDB’s case, a 20s network hiccup on a specific process could mean it is better to initiate a recovery anyway. I think for your use case that trade off makes sense as there are lots of journals, whereas FDB only runs a single database for clients to access.