Background

This section captures the why — design decisions, known pitfalls, and migration context that aren't obvious from the code alone.

Pages

• Design decisions — the big trade-offs the project committed to.
• Pitfalls and danger zones — places where it is easy to introduce subtle bugs.

Where canonical history lives

• Documentation/etcd-internals/ — internal architecture notes (with PNG diagrams of write workflows and consistent reads).
• Documentation/postmortems/ — incident retrospectives.
• CHANGELOG/CHANGELOG-3.X.md — per-release changelogs.
• security/SECURITY_AUDIT.pdf, security/FUZZING_AUDIT_2022.PDF — third-party audit reports.