There are plenty of ways to provision an etcd cluster. Normally, you'll use kubespray, kops (in AWS), or other provisioning tools.

Here, we'll simply show you how to perform a manual install. It's fairly easy as well:

// etcd installation script
$ cat install-etcd.sh
ETCD_VER=v3.3.0

# ${DOWNLOAD_URL} could be ${GOOGLE_URL} or ${GITHUB_URL}
GOOGLE_URL=https://storage.googleapis.com/etcd
GITHUB_URL=https://github.com/coreos/etcd/releases/download
DOWNLOAD_URL=${GOOGLE_URL}

# delete tmp files
rm -f /tmp/etcd-${ETCD_VER}-linux-amd64.tar.gz
rm -rf /tmp/etcd && rm -rf /etc/etcd && mkdir -p /etc/etcd

curl -L ${DOWNLOAD_URL}/${ETCD_VER}/etcd-${ETCD_VER}-linux-amd64.tar.gz -o /tmp/etcd-${ETCD_VER}-linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar xzvf /tmp/etcd-${ETCD_VER}-linux-amd64.tar.gz -C /etc/etcd --strip-components=1
rm -f /tmp/etcd-${ETCD_VER}-linux-amd64.tar.gz

# check etcd version
/etc/etcd/etcd --version

This script will put etcd binary under /etc/etcd folder. You're free to put them in different place. We'll need sudo in order to put them under /etc in this case:

// install etcd on linux
# sudo sh install-etcd.sh
…
etcd Version: 3.3.0
Git SHA: c23606781
Go Version: go1.9.3
Go OS/Arch: linux/amd64

The version we're using now is 3.3.0. After we check the etcd binary work on your machine, we can attach it to the default $PATH as follows. Then we don't need to include the/etc/etcd path every time we execute the etcd command:

$ export PATH=/etc/etcd:$PATH
$ export ETCDCTL_API=3

You also can put it into your .bashrc or .bash_profile to let it set by default.

After we have at least three etcd servers provisioned, it's time to make them pair together.