"If these values ever differ from what's currently in etcd, then my Django app will send a signal to cause uwsgi to gracefully restart the Django app, so that i

"If these values ever differ from what's currently in etcd, then my Django app will send a signal to cause uwsgi to gracefully restart the Django app, so that it can reload itself with the new configuration" You could probably avoid the restart/reload by using skydns (https://github.com/skynetservices/skydns https://github.com/skynetservices/skydns), it is a local dns service built on top of values in etcd. You can configure your django app to access the other service containers by dns name and it will be translated to the correct ip all the time.