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Service Discovery - CI/CD Glossary Definition

Service discovery lets services locate each other by name as instances scale up and down, avoiding hardcoded addresses.

Service discovery is the mechanism by which services find the network addresses of other services dynamically, rather than relying on hardcoded IPs, as instances come and go.

In dynamic clusters, pod IPs change constantly. Discovery is what keeps a freshly deployed service reachable by its stable name.

How it works

A Service object gives a stable virtual IP and DNS name; clients resolve the name and the platform load-balances across current healthy pods behind it.

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