I pointed at an open-source project by Cisco that pretty much sidesteps them entirely.

Obviously, CoreOS is going to start wanting your money pretty soon, as well.

Having worked for one of the earliest commercial linux distributors, I have little faith in such an effort to get anywhere. Red Hat and Canonical can barely make a dime.

Mesosphere isn't really an alternative to etcd, though. It relies on Zookeeper, which isn't perfect, but is much more battle torn than either Consul or etcd.

I have high hopes for something to replace Zookeeper, but I'm not deploying something in infancy which inherently can't heal from outages.