How services find each other — and how the mesh helps.
Service Discovery and Service Mesh: how services find each other
turn boundaries into contracts
Mesh adds ~1ms latency per hop.
Service discovery solves 'where is service X right now?'. DNS-based works for stable, slow-changing fleets. Registry-based (Consul, Eureka, Kubernetes endpoints) handles dynamic fleets and per-instance health.
Service mesh adds a sidecar per service handling discovery, retries, mTLS, telemetry, traffic shaping.
Mesh trades simplicity for uniform observability and policy. Operationally heavy if you're small.
Lightweight alternative: client libraries with retries + tracing + JWT, no sidecar.
Add a service mesh to existing microservices.