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DevOps Intermediate

What is Service Discovery?

A mechanism that automatically detects and tracks the network locations of service instances in distributed systems.

In dynamic environments where service instances are constantly created and destroyed, service discovery eliminates hardcoded addresses. Services register themselves when starting and deregister when stopping. Clients query the discovery system to find available instances. Tools include Consul (HashiCorp), etcd, ZooKeeper, and DNS-based discovery in Kubernetes. Client-side discovery (the client picks an instance) and server-side discovery (a load balancer routes requests) are the two main patterns. Service discovery is foundational for microservices architectures and container orchestration.

Related Terms

Container Registry
A storage and distribution service for container images, similar to a package repository but for Docker images.
Artifact Repository
A centralized storage system for build artifacts like compiled binaries, packages, and container images used in CI/CD pipelines.
Packer
A tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single configuration file.
Prometheus
An open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit that collects time-series metrics using a pull-based model.
Kubernetes ConfigMap
A Kubernetes object that stores non-sensitive configuration data as key-value pairs, injected into pods as environment variables or files.
Environment Variable
A dynamic value stored outside the application code that configures behavior without hardcoding sensitive or environment-specific data.
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