Why is the service discovery mechanism used in a distributed system?

Service Discovery mechanism in a distributed system is used for automatically determining the location and status of services so that clients and other services can interact with them.

Why is this needed:

• In dynamic environments (e.g., with containers or microservices), IP addresses and ports of services can change.
• It ensures scalability and fault tolerance by automatically redirecting requests to available instances.
• It simplifies configuration management and service integration.

Example: When a new service starts, it registers in a registry (e.g., Consul, Eureka), and clients query the registry for the current address of the required service.