Understanding the need for service discovery

Let's imagine that we have already divided our monolithic application into smaller, independent services. From the outside, our system still looks the same as before, because its complexity is hidden behind the API gateway. Actually, there are not many microservices, but, there may well be many more. Additionally, each of them can interact with the others. That means that every microservice has to keep information about the others' network addresses. Maintaining such a configuration could be very troublesome, especially when it comes down to manually overwriting every configuration. And what if those addresses are changing dynamically after restart? The following diagram shows the calling routes between our example microservices:

Service discovery is the automatic detection of devices and services offered by these devices on a computer network. In the case of microservice-based architecture, this is the necessary mechanism. Every service after startup should register itself in one central place that is accessible by all other services. The registration key should be the name of a service or an identificator, which has to be unique within the whole system in order to enable others to find and call the service using that name. Every single key with the given name has some values assigned to it. In the most common cases, these attributes indicate the network location of the service. To be more accurate, they indicate one of the instances of the microservice because it can be multiplied as independent applications running on different machines or ports. Sometimes it is possible to send some additional information, but it depends on the concrete service discovery provider. However, the important thing here is that under the one key, more than one instance of the same service may be registered. In addition to registration, each service gets a full list of the other services registered on the particular discovery server. Not only that, every microservice must be aware of any changes in the registration list. This may be achieved by periodically renewing the configuration earlier collected from the remote server.

Some solutions combine the usage of service discovery with the server configuration feature. When it comes right down to it, both approaches are pretty similar. The configuration of the server lets you centralize the management of all configuration files in your system. Usually, such a configuration is then a server as a REST web service. Before startup, every microservice tries to connect to the server and get the parameters prepared especially for it. One of the approaches stores such a configuration in the version control system—for example, Git. Then the configuration server updates its Git working copy and serves all properties as a JSON. In another approach, we can use solutions that store key-value pairs and fulfill the role of providers during the service discovery procedure. The most popular tools for this are Consul and Zookeeper. The following diagram illustrates an architecture of a system that consists of some microservices with a database backend that are registered in one central service known as a discovery service: