Interview Questions/Technical Deep Dive/Service Discovery Strategies
AdvancedTechnical
5 min

Service Discovery Strategies

Service DiscoveryMicroservicesNetworking
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Interview Question

Explain different approaches to service discovery in microservices and their trade-offs.

Key Points to Cover
  • Client-side discovery vs server-side discovery
  • DNS-based discovery (Consul, Eureka, Kubernetes DNS)
  • Service meshes for advanced routing
  • Trade-offs in latency, complexity, and resilience
Evaluation Rubric
Explains multiple discovery approaches30% weight
Discusses trade-offs of each30% weight
Mentions real-world tools20% weight
Applies context to choose approach20% weight
Hints
  • 💡Think client vs server responsibility.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
  • ⚠️Not considering the impact of stale service information due to DNS TTLs or slow registry updates.
  • ⚠️Overlooking the operational complexity introduced by custom client-side discovery logic or the overhead of a full service mesh.
  • ⚠️Failing to implement proper health checks for service instances, leading to requests being sent to unhealthy endpoints.
  • ⚠️Designing for a single point of failure in the service registry or load balancer without adequate redundancy.
  • ⚠️Coupling the application code too tightly with a specific service discovery implementation, making future changes difficult.
Potential Follow-up Questions
  • Which works best with containers?
  • What about multi-region setups?
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