What, why, and how of service registry and discovery

After looking briefly at service registry, we will understand the what, why, and how of service registry and discovery in this section. From understanding the need for service discovery, we will then understand the process and components involved in that process.

The why of service registry and discovery

Whatever container technology we go for, in production environments we will always have three four hosts and a number of containers inside each. In general, the way we distribute our services across all available hosts is totally dynamic and dependent on business capabilities, and can change at any point in time as hosts are just servers and they are not going to last forever. This is where service discovery and registry comes in. We need an external system that solves the limitations of a common web server, keeps an eye on all the services at all times, and maintains a combination of IP and port so that clients can seamlessly route to those...