Skip to main content

Service Discovery

This topic introduces you to service discovery for Kubernetes infrastructure, its significance, and its purpose.

What is a discovered service?​

Discovered service is an entity on the Harness platform (also known as the control plane) that corresponds to a Kubernetes service on your (user) cluster. It includes details about the connections made from and to it.

Below is the control flow to a discovered service.

Why is a discovered service required?​

Large enterprises deal with hundreds of deployed services. Monitoring these services on these services would require building a database of these services and the relationship between these services, which is time-consuming. Service discovery comes into the picture: Instead of creating a database with the services, automatically discover services and the relationship between them.

How does Harness discover services?​

Harness performs the following steps to discover services in your cluster:

  1. Scan your Kubernetes cluster periodically (you can define the interval or ad-hoc).
  2. Build a database of services that describes the relationship between the services.
  3. Provide APIs to group the discovered services into a map, wherein the map represents a topological view of an application.

How does Harness leverage discovered services?​

  • Identify the various available services in the Kubernetes cluster that you can deploy using Harness or other means.
  • Record the resources backing the above services (logical resources such as deployment, pods, containers, processes, FQDNs, ports, physical resources such as nodes, storage, and so on).
  • Highlight the given service's position and the lineage within the topology view.
tip

You can leverage all the permissions mentioned for service discovery.

Advantages​

  • Reduces overhead of creating a database with services
  • User-friendly
  • Increased adoption of Harness

When you are onboarding, one of the steps involves discovering services. Harness creates the discovery agent that automatically discovers services for your application.

Next Steps​