An interesting development since this post was made is the announcement of Kubernetes (k8s) from Google[1]. In k8s you define a collection of services via a set of labels, such as env=production,service=redis and then on localhost your application gets a environment variable to a "service proxy" port that load balances to these services within your k8s cluster.

This is all still controlled through etcd and right now only does round-robin load balancing but there are plans to do other strategies like master elected, least loaded, etc. You can read more about this concept over on the docs[2].

The nice thing about this whole model is that the application isn't aware or involved in things about master-election and is only configured once at startup to talk to a local port.

[1] https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes/ [2] https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubernetes/blob/maste...