Understanding Service Discovery

Setting the scene

Finding things on busy platforms like Kubernetes is hard, service discovery makes it easy.

Most Kubernetes clusters run hundreds or thousands of microservices apps. Each one sits behind its own Service for a reliable name and IP. When one app talks to another, it actually talks to the Service in front of it. For the remainder of this chapter, any time we say an app needs to find or talk to another app, we mean it needs to find or talk to the Service in front of it.

The following figure shows app-a talking to app-b via its Service object.