add a little intro

README.md

@@ -1,5 +1,19 @@
 # etcd
 
+A highly-available key value store for shared configuration and service discovery. etcd is inspired by zookeeper and doozer, with a focus on:
+
+* Simple: curl'able user facing API (HTTP+JSON)
+* Secure: optional SSL client cert authentication
+* Fast: benchmarked 1000s of writes/s per instance
+* Reliable: Properly distributed using paxos
+
+Etcd is written in go and uses the [raft][raft] paxos implementation for high availability. 
+
+See [go-etcd][go-etcd] for a native go client. Or feel free to just use curl, as in the examples below. 
+
+[raft]: https://github.com/coreos/go-raft
+[go-etcd]: https://github.com/coreos/go-etcd
+
 ## Getting Started
 
 ### Building