How does service discovery work in Kubernetes
Andrew White
Published Mar 23, 2026
Any pod whose labels match the selector defined in the service manifest will automatically be discovered by the service. This architecture provides a flexible, loosely-coupled mechanism for service discovery. When a pod is created, it is assigned an IP address accessible only within the cluster.
How does a service discovery work?
Server-side service discovery allows clients applications to find services through a router or a load balancer. Client-side service discovery allows clients applications to find services by looking through or querying a service registry, in which service instances and endpoints are all within the service registry.
How does Kubernetes service work?
A Kubernetes service is a logical abstraction for a deployed group of pods in a cluster (which all perform the same function). Since pods are ephemeral, a service enables a group of pods, which provide specific functions (web services, image processing, etc.) to be assigned a name and unique IP address (clusterIP).
How does service discovery work in Microservices?
In a microservices application, the set of running service instances changes dynamically. Instances have dynamically assigned network locations. Consequently, in order for a client to make a request to a service it must use a service‑discovery mechanism. A key part of service discovery is the service registry.How does Istio do service discovery?
Istio does not provide service discovery, although most services are automatically added to the registry by Pilot adapters that reflect the discovered services of the underlying platform (Kubernetes, Consul, plain DNS). Additional services can also be registered manually using a ServiceEntry configuration.
What is service discovery framework?
The service discovery framework provides a basis for developing plug-ins to discover services from any target environment. This means that, in addition to the target environments supported by the WSRR service discovery mechanism, you can discover services from your own custom target environments.
Which two protocols are service discovery protocols?
- Bluetooth Service Discovery Protocol (SDP)
- DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD), a component of zero-configuration networking.
- DNS, as used for example in Kubernetes.
- Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)
- Internet Storage Name Service (iSNS)
- Jini for Java objects.
Is API gateway same as service discovery?
The alternative to client-side discovery decouples the service discovery and load balancing logic from the client. With server-side discovery, the client or API gateway simply passes the request, including the DNS name, to a router. … In this case, the client or API gateway just needs to know the location of the router.How can one ensure high availability of service discovery?
- The unique name (URL) of each micro-service is used to determine its location. …
- Micro-services require addressable names to differentiate them from the infrastructure on which they work. …
- The registry is a vital component of the discovery of services.
Consul is a distributed, highly available, datacenter-aware, service discovery and configuration system. It can be used to present services and nodes in a flexible and powerful interface that allows clients to always have an up-to-date view of the infrastructure they are a part of.
Article first time published onIs Kubernetes service a load balancer?
In other words, Kubernetes services are themselves the crudest form of load balancing traffic. In Kubernetes the most basic type of load balancing is load distribution. Kubernetes uses two methods of load distribution. Both of them are easy to implement at the dispatch level and operate through the kube-proxy feature.
What is difference between service and deployment in Kubernetes?
What’s the difference between a Service and a Deployment in Kubernetes? A deployment is responsible for keeping a set of pods running. A service is responsible for enabling network access to a set of pods. … The deployment could be scaled up and down and pods could be replicated.
How do you deploy a service in Kubernetes?
- Step 1: Dockerize The Application. …
- Step 2: Creating A Deployment. …
- Step 3: Exposing Our Application Using Service And Ingress. …
- Step 4: Handling Application Configuration Using ConfigMaps. …
- Step 5: Securing Confidential Data Using Secrets. …
- Step 6: Deploying The Backend Storage (Redis) Using A StatefulSet.
Why are microservices not beneficial?
What is a notable disadvantage to using microservices? There is the potential for too much granularity. Complex testing is required. Latency issues can occur during heavy use.
Is consul a service mesh?
Consul is a service mesh solution that offers a software-driven approach to: Security (mTLS & ACLs) Observability. Traffic management.
Does Linkerd use envoy?
Why doesn’t Linkerd use Envoy? Envoy is a complex general-purpose proxy. Linkerd uses a simple and ultralight “micro-proxy” called Linkerd2-proxy that is built specifically for the service mesh sidecar use case. This allows Linkerd to be significantly smaller and simpler than Envoy-based service meshes.
How do I use network discovery?
- On this page.
- Register your service on the network.
- Discover services on the network.
- Connect to services on the network.
- Unregister your service on application close.
Is DNS a Service Discovery?
DNS Service Discovery is a way of using standard DNS programming interfaces, servers, and packet formats to browse the network for services. … DNS Service Discovery is compatible with, but not dependent on, Multicast DNS.
What is the purpose of Lldp?
LLDP is a neighbor discovery protocol that is used for network devices to advertise information about themselves to other devices on the network. This protocol runs over the data-link layer, which allows two systems running different network layer protocols to learn about each other.
Which is the centralized component used in service discovery?
The service discovery mechanism in DC/OS contains these components: A centralized component called Mesos DNS, which runs on every master. A distributed component called, dcos-dns , that runs as an application within an Erlang VM called dcos-net .
Is it possible for any service discovery tool to satisfy all the three guarantees?
Answer:-(1)No, only two of the guarantees can be achieved.
Is it possible for any service discovery tool?
It is not possible for any service discovery tool to satisfy all the three guarantees, that is, consistency, availability, partition, all together in a distributed environment.
Can an external service or process poll for all the services?
Can an external service or process poll for all the services and update the service registry for discovery? (1)Yes, it is possible.
How do I register my Microservices?
- Create the eureka server project. Create a spring boot application including the below changes to the pom.xml.
- Add spring cloud eureka support. To make our server an Eureka Server @EnableEurekaServer annotation is added.
- Configure application.properties / application.yml.
Is ZUUL a service mesh?
What is Zuul? It is the front door for all requests from devices and websites to the backend of the Netflix streaming application. As an edge service application, It is built to enable dynamic routing, monitoring, resiliency, and security.
What is service discovery and service mesh?
Gloo Mesh for multi-network service discovery A service mesh enables service-to-service communication and typically plugs in with a service discovery mechanism for a specific cluster or network. But a service mesh doesn’t automatically solve the multi-network problem.
What is service mesh in Kubernetes?
A service mesh is a configurable infrastructure layer for a microservices application. … Istio, backed by Google, IBM, and Lyft, is currently the best‑known service mesh architecture. Kubernetes, which was originally designed by Google, is currently the only container orchestration framework supported by Istio.
Which is better Consul or Eureka?
I feel Consul.io does better in the following area: The focus on scriptable configuration allows for better container management. Eureka requires either external Configuration Server or multiple configuration files. The options for securing communications is more advanced.
How registry and discovery services are done using Consul?
It correlates each running service with its registration based on the service’s port. In a multi-agent Consul datacenter, each service would register with its local Consul client, and the clients would forward the registration to the Consul servers, which maintain the service catalog.
Does Consul do load balancing?
Consul is a free and open source tool that provides service discovery, health checking, load balancing, and a globally distributed key-value store. … This is the job of the load balancing layer.
How do services communicate in Kubernetes?
Communication between pods and services In Kubernetes, a service lets you map a single IP address to a set of pods. You make requests to one endpoint (domain name/IP address) and the service proxies requests to a pod in that service. This happens via kube-proxy a small process that Kubernetes runs inside every node.