Mastering Service Mesh

Service discovery

The service discovery process in Consul is integrated with health checks, DNS, and HTTP interfaces. The Consul agent registers the service by adding an entry to the key-value store. When service discovery information is available in the Consul key-value store, that service can be discovered by other services.

In Consul, the process of service discovery uses a registry to keep a real-time list of services, their health, and their location information. It has the ability to find the location of upstream services so that the connection to it is transparent without a need for an external load balancer. However, a load balancer may be required for Ingress traffic coming to the service mesh from outside.

Consul has two approaches ...