Client-side service discovery

Intent

Service clients query the service registry and load-balance requests across instances themselves.

Use when

• You can ship a discovery client library in each language/runtime that needs it.
• You want clients to make routing decisions (LB strategy, zone awareness) without a centralized router.

Avoid / watch-outs

• Every client becomes “smart”: configuration drift and multi-language consistency get hard.
• Treat registry and discovery as part of your dependency graph; apply resilience patterns.

Skill mapping

• platform: shared discovery client and request wrappers.
• resilience: timeouts/retries/breakers and concurrency limits in clients.
• observability: record routing decisions and correlate failures across retries/instances.