Service registry and service discovery are two important concepts in the field of distributed systems and microservices architecture.
Service registry is a centralized database that contains information about available services in a distributed system. Each service instance registers itself with the service registry upon startup, providing metadata such as its network location, endpoint, and health status. This allows other services to discover and communicate with each other without hardcoding IP addresses or endpoints.
Service discovery is the process of dynamically locating and connecting to services in a distributed system. Instead of relying on static configurations or hardcoded endpoints, services use a service discovery mechanism to query the service registry and retrieve the necessary information to establish connections with other services. This allows for more flexible and resilient communication between services, as instances can be added or removed from the system without affecting the overall functionality.
Service registry and service discovery are essential components of modern microservices architectures, enabling services to be loosely coupled, scalable, and easily deployable. Popular tools for implementing service registry and service discovery include Consul, etcd, Zookeeper, and Kubernetes.