Service Discovery and Health Checks
Learn how microservices find each other dynamically and how health checks keep traffic flowing only to healthy instances.
The Discovery Problem
In a microservices system, instances start, stop, and move across hosts constantly. Hardcoding IP addresses breaks immediately.
Service discovery lets a service find healthy instances of another service by name at runtime.
Client-Side vs Server-Side
Two patterns exist:
- Client-side: the caller queries a registry and picks an instance
- Server-side: a load balancer or gateway resolves the name and forwards the request
All lessons in this course
- Designing Microservices Architecture
- Inter-service Communication
- Implementing an API Gateway with FastAPI
- Service Discovery and Health Checks