Service Discovery in a Complex Microservice Architecture

Abstract

Modern enterprise systems increasingly adopt microservice architectures to achieve agility, scalability, and resilience. However, managing service discovery in a complex microservice environment presents substantial challenges due to dynamic service lifecycles, decentralized communication, and rapid scaling. This paper investigates how service mesh frameworks, such as Istio and Linkerd, provide foundational support for service discovery, beyond their traditional roles in observability, traffic management, and security. Through comparative analysis, architectural modeling, and real-world use cases, we highlight how service meshes simplify service discovery, improve reliability, and enhance operational efficiency in Kubernetes-based deployments.