Service Discovery in NGINX Plus via etcd Service discovery is one of the big challenges for applications with a microservices architecture and for other distributed or service-oriented systems. The network locations of service instances can change frequently due to autoscaling, failures, or upgrades, so they are usually dynamically assigned. That means applications need a sophisticated service discovery mechanism for tracking the existence and current location of a service instance. This blog post describes how to dynamically add or remove servers in an NGINX Plus upstream group by registering them with etcd, a popular open source tool for service discovery. The solution uses NGINX Plus’ on-the-fly reconfiguration API, which eliminates the need to reload the NGINX Plus configuration when changing the set of load-balanced servers. With NGINX Plus Release 8 (R8), changes you make with the API can be configured to persist across restarts [ more… ]