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Comment by grogenaut | Hacker News Reader

Discovery can be quite simple, we've been doing it for years. On ECS/AWS we do it with just ALB and the cluster. Turns out DNS works really well, surprising for a fundamental internet technology. Tho if it's broken it's likely DNS that is the culprit.

If I need to route to other things I just configure other dns entries with SSM Parameter store... or I just manipulate the local resolvers in the VPC.

Very straightforward.

But I'm generally running just my software, not other people's, and consuming aws datastores.

This is for work.

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I am doing the same at my current company. We have a small team of 10 engineers, and DNS for discovery on AWS has been enough for us for the last 5 years. There hasn’t been a single issue for us in that time.

Does k8s not just use dns? That's what Hashicorp Nomad uses - DNS via Consul.

It does, every pod, service, etc. in the cluster has a fully qualified DNS name resolved by a DNS server in the cluster.

Yep, K8s has managed DNS, much like Nomad allows you to have.

But if that's a feature that you want, you can even use Docker Swarm which I mentioned in another comment here, which basically gives you the same thing, so that you can reference other containers by their names.

Of course, it's a bit simpler than Nomad, so if you're already using Nomad then there's no point in moving away from it, though this still illustrates that there are plenty of simpler options than K8s!

My point is that people come up with very powerful and complex routing systems using kube and conflate it with with "discovery". We did this at my work. Consul was the "only solution" that would "work" for us (pre kube). Consul is a type of discovery, but people also lop in service mesh features which are well beyond "what IP address do I need to send packets at".

4 years later consul is gone in aws for us replaced by this simple dns/alb scheme. We haven't really needed all the features of advanced discovery.

The key in general to "discovery" seems to be load balancers and dns in our approach (service protect thyself vs well behaved clients). Easy to use LBs on aws is very powerful feature. We don't have that on our on prem and it changes how we approach things. There discovery is harder.

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