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Service Discovery: Consul, etcd & DNS

Medium

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The service discovery problem

In a static world, services have fixed IP addresses and you configure them directly. In a cloud-native world, services start and stop on arbitrary hosts with dynamic IPs — sometimes hundreds of instances.

Service discovery solves this: services register themselves on startup; clients query the registry rather than hardcoding IPs. Consul, etcd (via Kubernetes), and service meshes are the main approaches.

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