Building Microservices with Go

Client-side service discovery

While server-side service discovery might be an acceptable choice for your public APIs for any internal inter-service communication, I prefer the client-side pattern. This gives you greater control over what happens when a failure occurs. You can implement the business logic on a retry of a failure on a case-by-case basis, and this will also protect you against cascading failure.

In essence, the pattern is similar to its server-side partner. However, the client is responsible for the service discovery and load balancing. You still hook into a dynamic service registry to get the information for the services you are going to call. This logic is localized in each client, so it is possible to handle the failure logic ...