Service Discovery

The Service Registry is the live database of service instances and their addresses, and Service Discovery is the process of querying that registry to resolve a service name into a healthy instance to call.

Service discovery turns a stable logical name like payment-service into a live, healthy, reachable address, and the registry is the always-updated phone book that makes it possible.

Eureka is a self-registration directory with heartbeat leases and client-side lookup; Kubernetes bakes the same capability into the platform via Services and CoreDNS, and Eureka remains useful off-Kubernetes, across clouds, or mid-migration.