Service Discovery

Summary

The mechanism by which services in a distributed system find each other's current network location — essential once services are dynamically scaled up/down and don't have fixed addresses.

How to Learn This

1Read how a service registry (e.g. Consul, or Kubernetes' built-in DNS) solves this problem.
2Understand why hardcoding IP addresses breaks down in any dynamically scaled system.
3Learn client-side vs server-side service discovery patterns.

API Gateway

Circuit Breaker Pattern

More topics in System Design

Scalability Basics Vertical vs Horizontal Scaling Load Balancing Database Replication Database Sharding CAP Theorem Microservices vs Monolith API Gateway Circuit Breaker Pattern Distributed Caching Consistent Hashing Rate Limiting Algorithms Designing a URL Shortener Designing a Rate Limiter

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