jargon

Platform & DevOps·Traffic into and inside the cluster

instances come and go constantly and callers never hold a stale address, because nobody is configured with one.

Service discovery

Also calleddiscovery, endpoint discovery

The mechanism by which a caller finds a currently-healthy instance of something whose addresses change all the time. On a container platform it is usually DNS plus a continuously-updated endpoint list maintained by the control plane, rather than anything the application does. The reason it is infrastructure rather than code is that the set of instances changes on every deploy, every scale event and every node replacement.

Commonly confused with