What are Service Discovery tools used for?

Service Discovery tools are needed for automatic detection and registration of services in distributed systems. They allow clients and other services to find current addresses and ports of services without the need to hard-code them in configurations.

This is especially important in dynamic environments where services can scale, restart, or move between hosts. Service Discovery provides:

• Automatic registration of services at startup.
• Updating information about available service instances.
• Load balancing and fault tolerance based on up-to-date service information.

Examples of tools: Consul, Eureka, Zookeeper, etcd.