Service discovery is a critical aspect of microservices architecture, enabling services to dynamically discover and communicate with each other. This document outlines some common service discovery patterns.

Common Patterns

  1. Centralized Service Registry

    • A centralized service registry holds the metadata of all services in the system.
    • Services register themselves with the registry when they start and deregister when they stop.
    • Clients query the registry to find service instances.

  2. DNS-based Service Discovery

    • DNS records are used to map service names to IP addresses.
    • This approach is simple and scalable but can be complex to manage.

  3. Consul

    • Consul is a tool for service discovery, configuration, and service mesh.
    • It provides a distributed key-value store and a service discovery mechanism.
    • Consul can be used with both DNS and HTTP-based service discovery.

  4. Eureka

    • Eureka is a RESTful service registry and discovery server for microservices.
    • It is part of the Netflix OSS suite and is widely used in the Java ecosystem.

  5. Zookeeper

    • Zookeeper is a distributed coordination service for distributed applications.
    • It can be used for service discovery and other coordination tasks.

Example

Here's an example of how a service might register itself with a service registry:

ServiceRegistry registry = ServiceRegistry.getInstance();
registry.registerService("my-service", "localhost:8080");

For more information on service discovery, you can read our Service Discovery Best Practices.

Service Discovery Architecture