The Ruby Way: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming, Second Edition

20.4. Service Discovery with Distributed Ruby

If you have many services running locally, service discovery might be a useful concept to you; it allows services to be located by name. But if you have few services at well-known locations, this may not be particularly useful.

Because you are apparently still reading, you must be interested in how service discovery works. The Rinda library provides such a service (naturally based on Rinda) called Rinda::Ring. Think of it as providing DNS-like features; it is a central registration service storing information (in a tuplespace) about drb processes. The drb services can use UDP (datagrams) to find a nearby registration server to advertise themselves and/or to find other services in the neighborhood. ...