How does service discovery work in cloud-native deployments?

Service discovery in cloud-native deployments enables applications to dynamically locate and communicate with each other without hardcoding network addresses. It is essential in microservices architectures where services scale up/down or restart frequently, causing IP addresses to change.

How it works:

1. Service Registration: When a service instance starts, it registers itself with a service registry (e.g., its hostname, port, and metadata).
2. Health Checking: The registry periodically checks if the service is healthy and removes unresponsive instances.
3. Service Lookup: When a client needs to call a service, it queries the registry to get the current endpoint(s).

Example:
A payment service (payment-service) registers with a registry like Consul or etcd. An order service (order-service) queries the registry to find payment-service's endpoint before sending requests. If payment-service scales to multiple instances, the registry provides all available endpoints, and the order service can use load balancing to distribute traffic.

In Tencent Cloud, Tencent Service Framework (TSF) provides built-in service discovery, integrating with its registry and supporting health checks, dynamic routing, and load balancing for microservices.